Watch What Happens When a Corner Store Ditches Booze for Bananas

Healthy Retail SF teaches markets in San Francisco’s food deserts how to shift to healthier options.

(Image: Vimeo)

Jul 31, 2015· 1 MIN READ

Culture and education editor Liz Dwyer has written about race, parenting, and social justice for several national publications. She was previously education editor at Good.

Cigarettes, candy bars, bags of chips, and bottles of hard liquor—those items tend to be staples at most mom-and-pop corner stores in low-income communities. But what if those store owners could be taught how to stop selling those products in favor of things not easily found in food deserts: fresh bunches of bananas, heads of romaine lettuce, and bags of grapes?

That’s the idea behind Healthy Retail SF, a program that helps stores begin stocking items that promote well-being: fruits and vegetables.

“The program is like a stool with three legs,” Susana Hennessey Lavery, an educator with San Francisco’s public health department, told NextCity. “The first leg is business operations, which includes how to have a business plan, use a POS [point-of-sale] system, how to stock and maintain produce. Because it’s not like alcohol and tobacco—it doesn’t just sit on a shelf. It needs to be handled every day, trimmed, watered, rotated.”

In the video below, we see the transformation of Satwinder Multani and Baljit Kuar’s store in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. The couple has operated Daldas Grocery in the historically high-poverty area for nearly nine years—and there have been few edible items on the shelves beyond processed junk food.

A lack of healthy food can put people on the path to obesity and other health-related problems, and one recent study found that a steady high-fat, high-sugar diet of candy bars, Hot Cheetos, and Takis could also be making people stupider.

Meanwhile, the proliferation of cigarettes and hard liquor has long been a problem in the disadvantaged community. There’s no full-size grocery store in the Tenderloin, but liquor retailers are in abundance. As a result, alcohol abuse is rampant in the neighborhood, which has led San Francisco to experiment with projects such as getting Tenderloin retailers to not sell booze before 8 a.m.

It doesn’t cost store owners anything to participate in Healthy Retail SF, although they do have to make a three-year commitment to selling fruits and vegetables. Consultants from Sutti and Associates, a firm that specializes in grocery store design that has partnered with the program, rehabilitate a corner store’s existing space so that fresh produce can be stocked. Meanwhile, the city donates refrigerated cases, shelves, and other necessities.

“We have signage, nutrition shelf displays, and we take down the majority of alcohol and tobacco ads, as well as all ads under five feet within the store, so children won’t be exposed to it,” Lavery said.

The program seems to be a win-win for everyone involved. Customers are buying the fresh produce, and Multani is turning a higher profit on sales of produce than when he peddled more junk food and alcohol.