It’s been estimated that roughly half of Waco lives in a food desert, an area where healthy, affordable groceries are hard to come by. The newly opened Jubilee Food Market, however, looks to change that for North Waco.
For the last year, Mission Waco, volunteers and North Waco community members have worked to transform the 6,500-square-foot space at North 15th street and Colcord Avenue into a nonprofit grocery store.
The store is a welcome addition to the neighborhood that is more than 2 miles away from the nearest grocery store.
Executive director Jimmy Dorrell told a crowd that the previous business was predatory, had one-liners and sold alcohol, and had basic groceries at marked up prices.
All of which, he says, the Jubilee Market won’t do.
“This store has a lot of great memories, but mostly for the last 20 or 30 years has been a convenient store that was very predatory by nature, took advantage by selling day old bread for more than the cost of fresh bread,” Dorrell told KWBU back in March.
For the North Waco community, a grocery store is something they have been waiting for. Doris Washington remembers walking back from the nearest H-E-B and seeing Dorrell looking at the decrepit building.
"I saw him over here looking at the building," Washington says, adding that Dorrell told her he was thinking of what to repurposing the space.
"I said, 'please, sir, we need a grocery store over here.'"
When Mission Waco acquired the building, the group held several community meetings to determine what the neighborhood wanted the space to become. The overwhelming request was a grocery store.
In the past year, the non-profit raised more than $650,000 that went towards renovating the former Safeway location. Dorrell says when considering the in-kind donations, or time contractors gave to the Jubilee Market, the total figure balloons to more than $875,000.
But maintaining the Jubilee Market will be a challenge. The profit margin for most grocery stores isn’t large, usually they rely on more than selling groceries. But the Jubilee Market won’t be doing that.
“This will not be easy,” Dorrell told a crowd of people outside the Jubilee Market. “We need you to shop, we need you to shop whether you live in this neighborhood or the other side of town. We need to sell a lot of food and we can do that.”
But North Waco is the exception.
The rest of the food deserts in the city are not going away any time soon, unless similar efforts are pursued or grocery chains go into these areas.
David Pooler, Associate Dean of the Diana R. Garland School of Social Work told KWBU in March that to reduce these food deserts, communities need to look for viable solutions.
“I wish that our community could see this as a ‘we’ problem and not a problem for parts of Waco”, Pooler says. “When there are people in Waco that don’t have access to that, that is our problem. And I think that all people, if you will, every segment of our community needs to get involved in solving it.”