Why Healthy Food Financing Matters

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that 40 million people live in neighborhoods without easy access to fresh, affordable, and nutritious food options. Accessing healthy food can mean multiple bus rides while carting groceries and children, or scrambling to find someone with a car who is willing to drive to the nearest market. This problem affects residents in both urban and rural parts of the U.S. — it is estimated that 14% of food-insecure households are in rural areas where a full service grocery store may be several miles away. These areas are greatly in need of reliable transportation, in addition to the jobs and economic activity that grocery stores and healthy food retail can provide.

The good news is that healthy food retail projects have been proven to revitalize local economies, expand access to healthy food, and improve health across the United States. Ensuring access to healthy food is an important element of an equitable food system, one in which those most vulnerable and those living in low-income neighborhoods, communities of color, and rural and tribal communities can fully participate, prosper, and benefit. An equitable food system is one that, from farm to table, from processing to disposal, ensures economic opportunity — high-quality jobs with living wages; safe working conditions; access to healthy, affordable, and culturally appropriate food; and environmental sustainability.

The federal Healthy Food Financing Initiative has helped leverage more than $320 million in grants and an estimated $1 billion in additional financing. The initiative has supported 1,000 grocery and other healthy food retail projects in 48 states across the country, revitalizing economies, creating jobs, and improving health.

 

What Is a Healthy Food Financing Initiative?

Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) refers to a policy model at the local, state or federal level that aims to provide financing for healthy food projects. These policies improve access to healthy foods in low-income and underserved areas; create and preserve quality jobs; and revitalize communities by providing loans and grants to eligible fresh, healthy food projects. Projects can include grocery stores, farmers markets, food hubs, co-ops and other businesses that sell healthy food. This financing allows retailers to overcome the high monetary barriers to entry in low-income urban, suburban, and rural areas that are underserved by healthy food retail. For more information about HFFI programs across the country, view The Food Trust’s HFFI Impacts Report.

Who Faces Limited Food Access?

Accessing healthy food is a challenge for too many Americans — particularly those living in low-income neighborhoods, communities of color, and rural and tribal areas.

  • Low-income ZIP codes have 25 percent fewer supermarkets and 1.3 times as many convenience stores as middle-income zip codes. Zip codes with predominately Black residents have about half as many supermarkets as ZIP codes with predominantly white residents and predominantly Latino areas have only a third as many as predominately white areas.
  • Low-income neighborhoods have half as many supermarkets as the wealthiest neighborhoods, according to an assessment of 685 urban and rural census tracts in three states. The same study found four times as many supermarkets in predominantly white neighborhoods as predominantly Black ones.
  • Nearly one-third of the U.S. population is transportation disadvantaged, meaning they cannot easily access a grocery store, work, or other basic personal and family needs. This is particularly a challenge for people of color and low-income individuals.

Healthy Food Access: Economic Impact

Healthy food projects and businesses improve the economic health and well-being of communities and can help to revitalize struggling business districts and neighborhoods. In addition to providing jobs across the food system, healthy food businesses also increase or stabilize home values in nearby neighborhoods, generate local tax revenues, provide workforce training and development, and promote additional spending in the local economy.

Creates and Retains Jobs

  • A large, full-service supermarket employs 150 to 200 full- and part-time employees and has weekly sales of $200,000 to $300,000.
  • From 2004 to 2010, the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative (FFFI) approved funding for 88 fresh food retail projects, resulting in more than 5,000 jobs and improving access to healthy food for more than 400,000 residents.
  • A study of six rural stores funded by the Pennsylvania FFFI found that five stores have increased employment in their communities and the sixth is run as a co-op. One store doubled its number of employees, from 48 to 100 workers.

Spurs Community Development

  • Grocery stores act as anchor development, attracting foot traffic and additional retail investment in a community.
  • Many full-service grocery stores engage in community development through local giving programs. In Portland, Oregon, the local New Seasons Market has volunteered over 849 hours of local community service.

Increases Property Values

  • A study of the impacts of supermarkets in Philadelphia indicates that the opening of a supermarket leads to increased housing values in the nearby community. In one Philadelphia neighborhood, housing values saw an immediate boost, ranging from a 4 to 7 percent increase after the opening of a supermarket.

Promotes Federal Nutrition Assistance Programs

  • Grocery stores, corner stores, and farmers markets that accept Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) benefits bring federal dollars into communities. This, in turn, produces economic benefits for stores, and spurs broader economic stimulus across states, regions, and the nation.

Healthy Food Access: Health Impact

Access to healthy food is a critical component of a healthy, thriving community. Improving healthy food access has been shown to be an effective measure in improving healthy eating habits and lowering the risk for diet-related diseases, such as diabetes and obesity.

Lower Risk for Diet-related Diseases

  • Neighborhood access to healthy food and safe places for physical activity matters for children’s weight. Children living in neighborhoods with healthy food and safe play spaces are 56 percent less likely to be obese than children in neighborhoods without these features.
  • Adults living in neighborhoods with supermarkets and grocery stores have lower obesity rates (21 percent) as compared to those living in neighborhoods with no supermarkets (32 to 40 percent). In Los Angeles, a study found a correlation between the distance traveled to a grocery store and body mass index (BMI) — longer distances are associated with higher BMI.

Healthier Eating

  • Adults with no supermarkets within a mile of their homes are 25 to 46 percent less likely to have a healthy diet than those with the most supermarkets near their homes.
  • Residents are more likely to meet dietary guidelines for fruit and vegetable consumption when they live in a census tract with a supermarket. For African Americans, produce consumption increases by 32 percent when they have these amenities.

Celebrating the Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI)

My HFFI Story features the inspiring work of 15 HFFI grantees who are responding with action, engagement, collaboration, and innovation to ensure all communities have access to healthy, affordable, and culturally appropriate food.
Cultivating Health, Wealth, And Entrepreneurship
Healthy food retail projects, from grocery stores, to mobile markets, and food hubs, can help to improve not only the physical health, but also the economic health and well-being of cities, neighborhoods, and historically disinvested regions. By financing healthy food-related projects, the Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) has emerged as an important tool to cultivate small business development, cooperatively and worker-owned enterprises, and innovative entrepreneurship platforms for residents – a critical strategy to building – and keeping – health and wealth in community.
Featured projects include:
Building Community Anchors Through Healthy Food Access
For many neighborhoods, a grocery store represents more than just a place to buy food. Community-centered, grocery stores and other food retail businesses that offer healthy food options often serve as critical anchors of a community’s social, economic, and cultural fabric. And in the case for many historically disinvested communities, the (re)opening of a grocery store can offer a resounding affirmation that they, residents and their communities, matter.
Featured projects include:
Scaling Up HFFI – Reinvestment Fund
As one of the original architects of the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative (FFFI), the model for the federal HFFI program, Reinvestment Fund is a community development financial institution (CDFI) and national leader in the financing of neighborhood revitalization. Since FFFI launched in 2004, Reinvestment Fund has taken a comprehensive approach to improving access to healthy, fresh food in low-income communities through the innovative use of capital and information.
Reinvestment Fund’s HFFI grants have supported a number of food retail projects that have revitalized neighborhoods across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast region, including the ShopRite at Springfield Avenue Marketplace in Newark, New Jersey; ShopRite of Howard Park in Baltimore, Maryland; and Fare & Square in Chester, Pennsylvania.
Featured projects include:
Farm-to-Table Innovations
Growing efforts are pointing to the challenges along the entire food system – from production, processing, to distribution – that deeply impact what many communities experience downstream in the form of inequitable access to quality, affordable, healthy food. Across the country, communities are tackling these supply chain issues head on through innovative strategies to better link regional producers to rural and urban retail markets that are in most need.
Featured projects include:
All photos and videos are courtesy of the organizations featured in this media project.

Video: Everyone Deserves Access

“We know that a lot of things contribute to poor nutrition and obesity but access is a key issue,” says Dr. Giridhar Mallya, formerly of the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. “People don’t have the ability to get healthy foods in their community at an affordable price. That makes it that much harder for them to be healthy overall.” See how The Food Trust and its partners are improving food access and health in Philadelphia and around the country.

Everyone deserves access to healthy food.

Research Primers on the Grocery Gap

The Grocery Gap, published in 2010, is still the most comprehensive review of studies of healthy food access and its impacts, reaffirming that access to healthy food is a critical component of healthy, thriving communities: