OAKLAND — For the first time in more than 40 years, a full-service grocery store is opening to serve the McClymonds, Hoover-Foster and Clawson neighborhoods of West Oakland.
The Safeway on 27th Street and San Pablo Avenue closed in the mid-1970s, and no companies have stepped in to fill the void until now. The approximately 9,000 residents in the food desert have been forced to either travel a half-mile to the Pak ‘N Save in Emeryville or farther to get their groceries, or buy overpriced, often low-quality food from liquor stores.
The need for an affordable, convenient supermarket prompted environmental justice activist Brahm Ahmadi to take matters into his own hands. Knowing that the large-scale chain grocery stores with their eyes on higher profits were unlikely to move into a historically low-income neighborhood such as West Oakland, he decided to open his own grocery store. About a decade later, Community Foods Market is finally gearing up to open its doors this Saturday at San Pablo Avenue and Myrtle Street.
The market’s opening is especially important to David Peters, who lives nearby and is on the market’s board of directors. He grew up in the neighborhood, and some of his fondest childhood memories involve walking down to the Safeway — now an AutoZone — with his grandmother to pick up food for family dinners.
“My grandmother was always cooking, and food was always part of our culture,” Peters said. “Now to have a market within walking distance, I have that connection with my childhood, and in certain ways it represents a renewal and rebirth of that neighborhood.”
Ahmadi, 44, and four or five of his crew members were stocking the store Wednesday, filling the aisles with canned and packaged food, taking inventory and setting up the espresso machine in the adjoining Front Porch Cafe — putting the finishing touches on the 14,000-square-foot market and cafe ahead of the grand opening ceremony scheduled for 11 a.m. Saturday. The free ceremony will feature live music, dance performances, a community resource fair, children’s activities, food sampling, mural painting and more and will last until 4 p.m.
The market’s produce selection features both organic and non-organic fruits and vegetables; the packaged food aisles, refrigerators and freezers have an array of both specialty and generic products. About 20 to 30 percent of the store’s products are organic, natural or specialty, while the rest are typically found at any supermarket. Community Foods Market also has a grab-and-go prepared food section and a meat and seafood counter.
The Front Porch Cafe will be open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. — an hour earlier than the market opens and an hour after it closes — and offer breakfast, lunch and dinner. Head chef Faust Howay said they will have custom sandwiches and wraps, as well as salads, breakfast items, pastries and smoothies, and will also serve dinner. A sandwich will cost around $8 — the cheapest will cost $6 — and a dinner plate about $10, Ahmadi said. The cafe also will have a coffee bar and will be used for community meetings and gatherings.
Ahmadi has hired around 50 people so far to work at the market, many of whom live in the surrounding neighborhood. He said he will hire around 10 more people as it gets going.
Ahmadi said the market’s prices will be well below those of Pak ‘N Save. It is able to offer the lower prices because of the market’s business model, which puts more focus on filling a void in the community than making money.
“If we were about making profit, I probably would have been elsewhere, just to be honest,” Ahmadi said in an interview. “I think we’ll do decently; it’s a pretty good-size market here, very underserved, there’s a lot of leakage of grocery expenditure out of this neighborhood. But at the end of the day, you’re not going to make a killing here; it’s really about the service.”
Though Community Foods Market is a for-profit business, Ahmadi characterizes it more as a “social enterprise.” He expects the business’ profits to be around 3 percent of its sales, which is less than what the big companies pull in — typically 4 to 5 percent, he said.
Because of the thin profit margins, he could not get banks to loan him money for the store. Most of the funding for the business came from grants and loans from nonprofit lenders; he also launched a direct public offering that resulted in around 650 investors buying stock in the company for a promised 3 percent return. Peters was one of several immediate neighbors who bought stock in the company.
Ahmadi got the idea for the business while running a nonprofit called the People’s Grocery, which delivered food to people who lived in the area. The people who he served were always telling him that they missed the Safeway on 27th, he said. When he crunched the nonprofit’s numbers, he realized he wasn’t making that big of an impact in terms of people the nonprofit was serving. That’s when he decided to go to business school in 2010 to open the grocery store.
Although getting funding was the toughest challenge, Ahmadi said, the venture also struggled to find real estate and get the necessary permits and land-use approvals. The building Ahmadi settled on was originally a motorcycle dealership, and during construction, crews found an underground fuel tank, and had to remove it on their own dime even though it was under a sidewalk, Ahmadi said.
“I knew from the jump that this was a high-risk endeavor. That’s the reason there aren’t any stores here, the reason why chain stores don’t come here,” Ahmadi said.
The costs of opening a grocery store at that location, in terms of money and time and effort, would drive away any “typical profit-making venture,” Ahmadi said. Since Community Foods Market isn’t that, Ahmadi was able to make it pencil out.
“Everything is 100 percent about the need, the impact, and the mission of the project,” Ahmadi said. “When your money is structured that way, all with very modest rates of return and low-interest rates and long terms and everything like that, you’re taking that pressure off the business to produce the rates of profits that other companies would need to service higher debt costs and costs to investors.”
