Project Background

Healthy Grocery Stores

While the Southern California grocery industry is primed for continued expansion and renovation throughout greater Los Angeles, in L.A.’s low-income communities the industry is failing to provide healthy food, quality jobs and environmental leadership. This failure affects not only poor neighborhoods, but the city as a whole, contributing to such costly public health issues as diabetes and childhood obesity as well as the city’s high rate of working poverty.

For the past several years, LAANE has been working with a coalition of community, faith and labor organizations to address the growing crisis of “food deserts” – areas of the city without adequate access to quality grocery stores and the good jobs that often come with them.

The Alliance for Healthy & Responsible Grocery Stores has joined with LAANE in launching the grocery reinvestment campaign, a bold effort to bring good supermarkets to all of the city’s neighborhoods.

At the heart of this effort is a basic principle: that the city has the right and responsibility to ensure access to healthy food and good grocery jobs. The grocery reinvestment campaign proposes that the city encourage supermarket development in less-affluent parts of the city by establishing a new permitting process for proposed grocery expansion. This process would offer city officials an opportunity to evaluate a supermarket chain’s impact on jobs, health and the environment. LAANE and the Alliance for Healthy & Responsible Grocery Stores are also urging major grocery chains to sign Community Benefits Agreements that would guarantee job access for local residents, good jobs and healthy food options in neighborhoods chronically underserved by the industry.

By reinvesting in communities, the grocery industry can help build a strong, healthy regional economy and a better city for all of us.