City-owned grocers may be a lifeline for the food insecure — but they’re not the only public model

In February 2025, WSCAH began piloting a different way of serving 150 households in three under-resourced zip codes: a public-private partnership — one of several models of public grocery store — that would give customers $50 to place orders of produce through Mercato, an online grocery platform that sources from independent local supermarkets, with free delivery. The pilot is occurring amid a surging imbalance in who can and cannot afford food and other essentials like rent and health- and child care. This is driving a loud national conversation about public grocery stores, precipitated by NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s policy proposals. Such stores have been enthusiastically embraced by many food policy experts as a way to get groceries into so-called food deserts; Illinois, for example, recently announced $10 million in grants to open supermarkets in previously supermarket-less neighborhoods.

For WSCAH’s CEO and executive director, Greg Silverman, however, the idea of building more “old-school” brick-and-mortar grocers — even ones that would be city-owned, like those pitched by Mamdani — misses a critical point. With more SNAP recipients using their benefits for home delivery (WSCAH’s pilot participants can use those benefits on Mercato, too), Silverman believes that the future of food access is less about physical stores, and more about ensuring that affordable food gets to the people who need it — by any means necessary.

The WSCAH pilot, though too new to yet provide any useful data, is a potentially promising way to adopt a public grocery model in some places; a 2024 study by Vanderbilt University’s Policy Accelerator identifies four models: municipally owned, nonprofit, public-private, and cooperative grocers. It connects private companies (Mercato and local supermarkets) with the WSCAH nonprofit, supported by a combination of public and private funds, all with the intention of serving a community. But no matter the model, making and keeping food affordable in a political environment that very much favors the haves over the have-nots is a massive challenge. “Some days I just wonder, Oh my gosh, how are we going to solve this?” says grocery retail specialist Jeanie Wells. But after the supply chain failures brought on by the pandemic, in addition to the current tariff climate, she sees local control of food distribution through these alternative supermarket models “as the most meaningful way to run a grocery store, now more than ever.”

Public grocers’ struggle to survive

Critics of public grocers say they’re unrealistic and anti-capitalist. Vanderbilt researchers found they offered a slew of benefits. Neither beholden to shareholders nor “wholly defined by external factors like market forces,” the authors write, public grocers can “ensure that disadvantaged individuals have real access to some of the necessities for competing and thriving in modern America.” Says Margaret Mullins, director of public options and governance at Vanderbilt’s accelerator, government-assisted stores can “make communities thrive where there really hasn’t been incentive for the private sector to do so.”

Unfortunately, the stores often struggle to survive; in fact, three of four public grocers highlighted in the study had gone out of business as of this writing. Concentration in the grocery industry increases the likelihood of failure. Walmart, which alone controls 25 percent of the U.S. market, along with the other two biggest U.S. grocers, Costco and Kroger, can purchase products for less than smaller chains or independent grocers. As a result they have lower operating costs and significantly higher profits. Explains Wells, “It doesn’t really matter whether it’s cooperatively owned or if it’s a nonprofit or if it’s city owned; any of the [independent] ownership models all are up against the constraints of the model itself” — namely, trying to hold onto 1 percent net profit (a pittance for a $1 million-a-year small operation, versus billions in profits for the likes of Walmart, which it can use to reinvest in itself). This can only be achieved “if everything goes perfectly and there aren’t any sudden, unplanned, unforeseen expenses.”

Vanderbilt’s Mullins expresses frustration over lack of enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act, an antitrust law from 1936 meant to ensure that an entity like Walmart can’t access lower wholesale prices than your local corner store. She’d like to see plaintiffs emerge to “bring lawsuits forward under this law that exists that’s supposed to guarantee fair pricing.”  Although she admits that since the law hasn’t been enforced in decades, those might be uphill battles. Another possibility: “States could implement non-discriminatory pricing laws” of their own.

Wells points to the value of banding together, both to gain better purchasing power and to strategize; food pantries have adopted this tactic, too, to buy more and better food at lower prices. Cooperative grocers have such a network in the National Cooperative Grocers (NCG) Association, an assemblage of 166 member co-ops running 240 stores in 39 states. Independent organic and natural grocers have a similar setup through an organization called INFRA. “The performance metrics of the NCG stores, for example, are outperforming the national average in terms of independent stores and I think it probably is because they treat it like a virtual chain,” Wells says. “Each of the businesses is an autonomous, independent business, with local control and local ownership, but they’re leveraging things together to drive down costs and to maximize their negotiating power in the marketplace.”

When we spoke, Wells, awaiting a flight home to Kansas after running a bootcamp for the state of Vermont on boosting local foodways, was nevertheless feeling invigorated and hopeful. “There’s 85 people on this meeting talking about multilevel strategies for food access — everyone from producers to farm stores to food hubs to small retailers to large multistore retailers,” she says. “It wasn’t just, We need food to come on trucks to the store. It was, How do we involve people on every level? What are the resources in this region? How do we get them to more people? How do we employ more people in the local control of these food systems?” In those questions lie the seeds of potentially powerful answers.