Birmingham’s Food Desert Plan: More Grocers, Fewer Dollar Stores
Shelves are loaded at the new Harvest Market in Downtown Birmingham.
At Harvest Market in downtown Birmingham, there’s fresh produce, a juice bar, and local specialty items. And there are the basics — milk, bread, canned goods, and rice. It’s a small independent grocery store that opened last week.
There are already plans for expansion within the city. The owner recently purchased Village Market, a grocery store in East Lake, after rumors it may close.
“With us having multiple stores within our buying group, we’re able to purchase products that we can implement in those stores and keep the price point down,” operations manager Jeff Gentry says.
Gentry and Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin share a common goal: to improve access to healthy food around the city.
Over the last few years, more than half a dozen stores have closed around the city, including Walmart and Winn-Dixie. That has left residents dependent on local meat markets, corner stores and dollar stores for groceries.
Gerry D’Alessandro, a third-generation grocer with stores in Bessemer and Trussville, says for him, opening a store in Birmingham is risky business. And there’s one big reason. “The proliferation of dollar stores has been the biggest game changer in low income areas,” he says. “This makes it less attractive for a full-service grocery store to operate in those areas.”
City officials are aware. They plan to limit the number of dollar stores as part of Woodfin’s “Healthy Foods Ordinance.” If approved by the city council, the ordinance would also loosen zoning restrictions on fresh food producers, giving them more leeway on where they sell their products around Birmingham.
The city also recently set aside half a million dollars to help offset the cost of opening a grocery store in the city’s food deserts.
Josh Carpenter, Birmingham’s director of innovation and economic opportunity, says it’s getting harder for larger supermarkets to survive in many cities. One reason? Online retailers like Amazon.
“Amazon starts selling fresh produce overnight and all of a sudden everyone who’s accustomed to buying things on Amazon have a new service of delivery that brick and mortar stores find difficult to compete with,” he says.
But Carpenter says the city has a strategy. Instead of chasing after big grocery chains, the city will try to attract smaller stores.
“We see the new grocery store as being a smaller model that targets healthy food options and works with and alongside the community to understand their needs and desires,” he says.
Carpenter says the solution won’t happen overnight. But he says Harvest Market downtown is a start. So far, the store has attracted downtown residents and people who work in the area.
Meanwhile, the city hopes to cut the number of residents living in food deserts almost in half by 2022.
How George Wallace and Bull Connor set the stage for Alabama’s sky-high electric rates
After his notorious stand in the schoolhouse door, Wallace needed a new target. He found it in Alabama Power.
FIFA president defends World Cup ticket prices, saying demand is hitting records
The FIFA President addressed outrage over ticket prices for the World Cup by pointing to record demand and reiterating that most of the proceeds will help support soccer around the world.
From chess to a medical mystery: Great global reads from 2025 you may have missed
We published hundreds of stories on global health and development each year. Some are ... alas ... a bit underappreciated by readers. We've asked our staff for their favorite overlooked posts of 2025.
The U.S. offers Ukraine a 15-year security guarantee for now, Zelenskyy says
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday the United States is offering his country security guarantees for a period of 15 years as part of a proposed peace plan.
Genre fiction and female authors top U.S. libraries’ most-borrowed lists in 2025
All of the top 10 books borrowed through the public library app Libby were written by women. And Kristin Hannah's The Women was the top checkout in many library systems around the country.
The Best Tiny Desk Concerts of 2025
Which Tiny Desk made an audio engineer question everything? Which one made a producer want to cry? Touch grass? Look back on the year in Tiny Desk, with the people who make them.
