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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Food Desert Solution: Mobile Supermarkets
  • Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2011 09:54:34 -0600


Food Desert Solution: Mobile Supermarkets
http://www.good.is/post/food-desert-solution-mobile-supermarkets/

You’ve heard of food trucks and green carts. Now there’s a building momentum
around mobile supermarkets that can tackle the country's food deserts.

Rick Schnieders grew up working in a little grocery store in Iowa and worked
for years with Sysco, the United States' largest food distributor, until
retiring a year and a half ago. He admits that he doesn't play golf or own a
boat, so he's making the most out of retirement with a for-profit company
called Mogro.

The mobile grocer started trucking in groceries in a 33-foot long trailer—10
full bays with 200 supermarket items—in Santo Domingo Pueblo, a Native
American community in New Mexico. It’s basically a beer trailer with added
refrigeration. Shopping there is sort of like walking through an outdoor
grocery store, albeit one with only two aisles and no chips, soda, or candy
bars.

"The trailer is the easy part," Schnieders told me. "The rest of it becomes
pretty complicated. You’ve got to find a distributor. You’ve got to have a
driver with a Commercial Driver’s License. Just showing up in a community is
not enough. We’ve partnered with Johns Hopkins to do cooking classes and
events, so you do have to put a lot of pieces together.”

What also makes Mogro different from other mobile food banks and
grocers-on-wheels is that it stocks more than just fruits and vegetables.
Schnieders doesn't think there's a high enough return on produce to make that
venture economically sustainable. In the long-run, perhaps the business could
be a model for filling in the gaps that make food deserts—access to healthy
affordable food.

"But the real reason we're doing this is because we love this part of the
country," he says. "We love the people. It’s an absolute crying need. My wife
and I have a biding interest in food, agriculture, and nutrition. And we
wanted to see if we could make this work."




  • [Livingontheland] Food Desert Solution: Mobile Supermarkets, Tradingpost, 06/14/2011

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