It is no secret that Black Americans are underrepresented as business owners.
They make up about 12.4% of the US population, but Black business owners are only 2.4% of all employer-owned firms. And while Census data shows that the number of Black-owned businesses in the US is up 14% since 2020, black owned grocery stores have been declining since the 1970s.
As a result, low-income Black neighborhoods are often packed with unhealthy food options, and when fresh food groceries do spring up in these areas, they are predominantly owned by people of other racial backgrounds. A lack of capital due to the racial wealth gap has proven to be a significant barrier to entry for Black entrepreneurs looking to join the industry.
Raphael Wright noticed that for many people in Detroit, shopping for fresh food required driving at least 20 minutes outside of their neighborhood. So he used crowd funding and grants to open his “Neighborhood Grocery”, last November, the first Black-owned grocery store in Detroit since 2014 in a city that is 78% Black.
Owning a profitable grocery store requires major funding, both at the outset and to continue operations, with costs such as transportation of goods and advertising.
“Just being a solo grocery store owner is not something you can easily do,” said Hazel Dukes, president of the New York chapter of the NAACP. “You have to have the money to supply the products the people want.”
The existing racial wealth gap results in Black families in the US having at least 13 times less wealth than their White counterparts. Financial insecurity reduces the likelihood of being able to start any business, let alone a grocery store.
Earnest Flowers, a Black grocer in Queens, New York, is another person who has beaten the odds.
His store, Earnest Foods on Merrick Boulevard in Jamaica, Queens, carries a range of Black-owned organic products, everything from honey to West Indian seasonings to free-range eggs. He has searched far and wide for another Black grocer in the entire state, but so far, he’s found only the small convenience stores abound in New York—locally called “bodegas”, and often owned by people of color—but these don’t quite fit the definition of a grocery store.
His store, Earnest Foods on Merrick Boulevard in Jamaica, Queens, carries a range of Black-owned organic products, everything from honey to West Indian seasonings to free-range eggs. He has searched far and wide for another Black grocer in the entire state, but so far, he’s found only the small convenience stores abound in New York—locally called “bodegas”, and often owned by people of color—but these don’t quite fit the definition of a grocery store.
Groceries are retail businesses with gross floor space around 10,000 square feet, where the majority of that space is dedicated to food and beverage items, produce and household essentials. Smaller groceries can have retail floor space between 5,000 and 10,000 square feet.
“They’re usually owner-operated, not run by multinational public corporations like supermarkets are,” said Tom Griffin, the manager of FoodIndustry.com.
Some privately-owned smaller groceries are following a co-op model of shared ownership among multiple members of a community. It is an alternative to the route of solo grocer-preneurship, one that can ease the burden of navigating logistical issues such as finding adequate store space or getting in touch with suppliers.
While there is evidence of progress for Black grocers in the industry, glaring problems persist.
Georgetown law professor Sheryll Cashin determined that there was a correlation between the actions of the federal government in the 1930s and the marginalization of Black neighborhoods today. The author of “White Space, Black Hood” said that the decision to mark Black communities as hazardous and not worthy of support has resulted in a lack of the resources that lead to greater economic autonomy.
“There’s not a lot of investment, public or private, in these historically redlined neighborhoods,” Cashin said. “Entrepreneurship by the people who live there is one way of countering that.”
Poor data collection on the race of grocers at national and state levels means there are few major data sources that can provide evidence to underscore the dearth of Black grocers.
The National Grocers’ Association, for instance, does not track the race of its 1500 members, according to Jim Dudlicek, their content strategist. NGA members make up a fraction of the 21,000 privately-held or family-owned grocery stores in the United States that generate more than $250 billion in sales. The website for the National Grocers’ Association displays a section dedicated to Women Grocers of America, but no such section exists for minority-owned grocers.
Filling the void are people like journalist Zachary Zawila, whose research on the race of food store owners in New York found that as of 2018, the majority of food stores in the city were owned by Hispanics (32%) and Whites (22%), followed by Middle Easterners / South Asians (15%) and Koreans (11%). None of the owners were Black.
Flowers, whose grocery opened in November 2021, embraces the idea of more Black people becoming grocers. The more Black-owned stores there are, the more buying power, he said. Collaboration could increase the possibility of purchasing goods from Black-owned farms as well. An 18-wheeler delivery truck carrying fresh produce can set a grocer back at least $5000 one-way–without factoring in the price of the goods in tow. It’s not a rate that Flowers can afford to pay alone, and he isn’t willing to have his customers foot the bill either.
“How can you justify passing that cost on to the consumers?” he asked. “You can’t. Unless there are a bunch of Black-owned grocery stores here that are buying from those places at the same time, then we can split the cost of transportation. That would be amazing.”