Creating Healthier Choices for Black and Brown Communities: Shaping Food Access through Retail

Access to fresh, affordable and nutritious food remains a problem for low-income communities of color.  They typically have fewer supermarkets, poorer quality grocery stores, and a heavy use of bodegas or corner stores.  This contributes to a greater and unfair prevalence of health disparities within communities of color. 

This problem can be seen in the Brooklyn communities of Bushwick, Brownsville, East New York and Bedford-Stuyvesant, neighborhoods of Central Brooklyn.  According to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Central Brooklyn consists of higher proportions of Black and Hispanic residents, as well as higher rates of poverty, obesity and mortality when compared to New York City.  Changing the landscape of food retail in low-income neighborhoods is critical in addressing equity and food access.  On September 6^th The Partnership for a Healthier Brooklyn and the NYC Food and Fitness Partnership launched a healthy retail initiative at a heavily used supermarket in Bedford-Stuyvesant.  The pilot featured implementations such as displays with water at eye-level, healthier alternatives at checkout lanes, such as nuts and dried fruit, “easy to eat well” and “buy local” signage to highlight healthy and local options, cooking demonstrations and supermarket tours.  By tracking point-of-sale data we will determine the impact of the pilot program while surveying participants of subsequent supermarket tours to glean what the most important changes to shoppers are.  Our goal is to increase food access and equity through the expansion of this pilot to other stores in Central Brooklyn while maintaining culturally relevancy.