McKinney, Texas has a large food desert in a wealthy county. Could a grocery store work?

Customers browse popular items: a dozen eggs for $3.89, fresh nopalitos for 69 cents a pound and chicken drumsticks for $1.19 a pound. Many will walk home with their items from Jubilee Food Market, a neighborhood grocery store that they rely on for healthy, affordable food.

It sits in the middle of one of North Waco’s poorest ZIP codes, an area the U.S. Department of Agriculture classifies as a food desert — a low-income area where people have limited access to a variety of healthy and affordable food and where a significant number of them live more than 1 mile in urban areas or 10 miles in rural areas from the nearest supermarket.

“The fun part of the grocery store is you get to see neighbors that otherwise would have nowhere to shop walking from the apartment complex down the street up to the grocery store with a great big ol’ smile on their face,” said John Calaway, executive director of Mission Waco, the nonprofit organization that covers the store’s losses.

Scott Elliott wants to bring something similar to the food desert in McKinney, which is the largest city by area and population in wealthy Collin County, according to the USDA’s Food Access Research Atlas, which relies on population data based on the 2010 census. The desert covers the majority of the 75069 ZIP code in East McKinney.

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At the end of 2021, Elliott — a former McKinney City Council member, former director of Community Lifeline Center and now director of the nonprofit One Heart McKinney — and A.J. Micheletto, director of programs at Love Life Foundation, started researching what it would be like to put a grocery store in McKinney’s food desert.

The duo visited three grocery stores that had been built in food deserts — Jubilee Food Market in Waco, Oasis Fresh Market in Tulsa, Okla., and Carver Neighborhood Market in South Atlanta, Ga. — to study commonalities and best practices. Things they saw that worked well: models between 10,000 and 12,000 square feet; stores that included a cafe; stores accepted government assistance programs like SNAP and WIC; stores that had economically diverse shoppers; and the ability to deliver groceries, Elliott said.

Markets like Jubilee can point to ways to successfully open and sustain a grocery store in such areas: The 6,500-square-foot store relies on strong community relationships, local suppliers and growers, and unique approaches to attract buyers from outside the neighborhood to keep its doors open and serve a community that lacks access to affordable, healthy food options.

Rooted in community

Jimmy Dorrell opened Jubilee Market in 2016. Dorrell, who co-founded and is president emeritus of Mission Waco, has lived in the neighborhood where the store is located since 1978 when he and his wife, Janet, bought a 4,000-square-foot house for $12,000. The neighborhood was “messy,” Dorrell said. Prostitutes and crack-dealers were commonplace. Yet, it’s where the couple raised four kids and formed key community ties.

“Everybody in the neighborhood knows who he is,” Calaway said.

The couple built a basketball court on the property where kids would flock and teenagers would challenge each other to games. Neighborhood moms would come by to summon their kids for dinner.

“Everything we did was sort of a bottom-up approach, which is the way we work, so listening to the neighborhood is very key to our model,” Dorrell said. “As we built relationships throughout the years the mamas in particular kept saying, ‘Please help us find a way to get a place to buy healthy affordable food.’”

Bigger grocery stores sat on the edges of town, and people in the neighborhood either had to walk 2.2 miles to the closest H-E-B or buy food at the neighborhood convenience store that also sold cigarettes and lottery tickets. In 2015, Mission Waco purchased the convenience store, which used to be a Safeway that left the neighborhood in the ‘60s, for around $130,000.

Dorrell rallied 65 neighbors who spent hours at the old, deteriorating store imagining what it could be.

“They came up with 12 choices,” Dorrell said. “Out of those 12, they voted and 77% wanted it to be a healthy and affordable grocery store.”

After about six months of renovation, the store opened, and Dorrell made sure to keep the focus on the wants and needs of the community. He hired staff from the neighborhood and stocked the shelves with their requests: oxtails, pig ears, corn husks for tamales, cabrito and Blue Bell ice cream. The neighborhood is 50.3% Hispanic, 28.3% Black and 19.5% white, according to census data.

“Embracing people from the community matters,” Dorrell said. “It feels like it’s their store.”

Keeping the shelves stocked

But even with strong community relationships, one of the biggest challenges to keeping a market-style grocery store open in a food desert is finding funds to make up for losses.

Grocery stores aren’t established in a food desert to turn a profit, said Jeremy Everett, executive director of the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty. It’s a “mission-driven” endeavor.

“There’s a reason why the H-E-Bs and the Sam’s [Clubs], the Walmarts, these big chain grocery stores aren’t going into food deserts, because the margins are slim to begin with and people are not spending,” Calaway said.

When Jubilee first opened, people spent about $8.75 per transaction, Dorrell said. Many qualified for the discount programs offered by the store, and shoppers bought for the next day or next couple of days compared to the average middle-class customer who typically shops for the whole week in one trip, Calaway said.

In 2022, the average sale was about $10.77 with 52,705 annual transactions. Yet, the store is not self-sustaining. General contributions to Mission Waco, which funds 18 different programs inspired by the needs in the community with an annual budget of $4.2 million, have offset the loss.

The single most significant loss at the store comes from its rewards program, Calaway said. For every $10 a customer spends, they get $1 back. He said the model is essential to helping people in the neighborhood afford healthy groceries.

“Eventually we will probably need to see some significant subsidy from a third party, whether that’s a city resource or private donor,” Calaway said. “But for it to be self-sustaining, it’s just really, really challenging because profit margins are so slim.”

To make up for some losses, Jubilee uses local suppliers and works to attract people who live outside of the neighborhood to shop there, too.

While the majority of products come from a supplier in Houston, a variety of local vendors, including many at the downtown farmer’s market, give Jubilee deals, and Urban REAP, a part of Mission Waco, has an aquaponics system that provides fresh produce for the store.

Selling products people would normally see at the farmer’s market at a lower rate has helped attract middle-class customers who typically spend more during a shopping trip. The store has also leveraged its proximity to Baylor University through marketing to students, and they’re working with area churches to draw in a wider customer base.

Lessons learned

Based on visiting Jubilee, Oasis and Carver Market, potential plans for the market that Elliott wants to bring to East McKinney include a 10,000- to 12,000-square-foot full-service grocery store with a cafe and a place where the community can gather not only to shop but also to participate in community events and sell their own wares. He pictures an L shaped building that will create a shaded, communal courtyard space.

“Anybody that’s looking to start a grocery store like this has to be creative with what is in there and the space, but also be very strategic about what you’re providing and how much it’s costing the folks that are coming in there,” Calaway said. “And then be real careful to track what you’re doing to make sure it’s making an impact.”

Elliott said it would be important to offer a delivery option and SNAP and WIC benefits as well as a loyalty card to provide additional discounts to qualifying customers.

Micheletto and Elliott have identified a name: “McKinney Market.” Now, they are focused on getting certification to officially form a legal entity, registering for federal and state identification numbers as well as finding out if the land they originally considered is still available.

“There’s risk. You got to do it for the long haul,” Dorrell said. “You got to know you’re going to lose money for awhile. You have to have a good connection to the neighborhood. But access to healthy, affordable food is a worthy project worth risking for.”