Food retailers in Rochester may now apply for city grants of between $25,000 and $250,000 to enhance their inventory of healthy foods, Mayor Malik Evans announced Monday.
The grants can be used by small-scale grocers, specialty food shops, meat markets, and restaurants and corner stores to buy fruits and vegetables, or expand their capacity to stock such foods and showcase them.
Food truck and food cart proprietors looking to establish a brick-and-mortar location may also apply. Proposals are being accepted online.
“We have to do this because we have people who feel as though they don’t want to invest in Rochester,” the mayor said at a news conference at City Hall. “So we have to be proactive.”
His comments came on the heels of news that a major retailer, Rite Aid, would be closing a location on Portland Avenue. Evans also said he wants to ratchet up pressure on large grocers to invest in opening stores within city limits.
“Many of these of these places got their starts in Rochester and made money off of Rochester and then said, ‘You know what? It’s just not a place we want to be,’” Evans said.
The “Healthy Foods Grants Program” is part of a $5 million pot of federal pandemic-relief funds that City Council last year approved using to increase access to quality foods in underserved neighborhoods and entice residents to buy them.
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The program dovetails with the aims of the city’s broad and ambitious Food Policy Council, a public-private partnership created by the city two years ago to address healthy food access concerns.
Nearly every neighborhood in Rochester is what is commonly referred to as a “food desert,” a term adopted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to describe a low-income area with few places where residents can easily buy healthy food.
The term, though, has fallen out of favor with food policy analysts and advocates, who have come to increasingly refer to Rochester as more of a “food swamp,” an urban area with an abundance of food that is unhealthy and where healthy food is often hard to find. The result is what they call “food apartheid” — systemic unequal access to nutritious food.
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“Store after store, when we go inside, we see shelves of salty chips, candy, soft drinks,” said Dana Miller, commissioner of the city Department of Neighborhood and Business Development, who announced the food retailer grants at City Hall alongside the mayor. “We don’t see vegetables and fruits.”
He said members of his agency have gone door-to-door encouraging small retailers to apply for a grant.
“Obviously, if we had the opportunity to bring more full-service supermarkets in, that would be great,” Miller said. “But absent that opportunity . . . we work with the folks who are already in our neighborhoods.”
