St. Pete opens its first FRESH Pace Healthy Neighborhood Store

St. Petersburg just announced the debut of its newest project to help battle food insecurity in the city's lower-income neighborhoods.

The city’s first FRESH Pace Healthy Neighborhood Store is located inside Rajax Food Mart and Meat Market at 2327 Dr. Martin L. King Jr. St. S., adjacent to Boyd Hill Nature Preserve and Bartlett Park.

The new health-conscious market will offer nutritious food including fresh fruits and vegetables, low-fat proteins, whole grain items, and low-fat dairy products or dairy alternatives.

The city of St. Petersburg opened this new market with the goal of “incentivizing neighborhood stores in low-income, low-access areas to expand their healthy food options at an affordable cost to their customers."

This new market opens in collaboration with the St. Pete Free Clinic, which also “assists in subsidizing food costs for the stores and helps business owners navigate the process of accepting EBT and WIC if they do not already do so.”

In an effort to open more of these healthy markets, SPFC is continuing to collaborate with existing corner stores to "establish infrastructure, marketing plans, and sustainable business models" to help them support a  FRESH Pace Healthy Neighborhood Store within their businesses.

It’s no secret that south St. Pete is considered a USDA-designated food desert, with no major grocery stores after the closure of Tangerine Plaza’s Walmart Neighborhood Market in 2017.

Alongside this new city-sponsored neighborhood store—which was made possible through funds from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA)— there are several other local efforts to provide St. Pete with fresh and healthy foods, like the community-ran S.T.O.R.Y. 727 organization, Reach St. Pete, the Southside Fresh Market and the St. Pete Youth Farm.

While this is the first FRESH Pace Healthy Neighborhood Store to debut in St. Pete, there are hopefully several more on the way. The city has allocated $1.179 million dollars of its ARPA funds towards Food Security, which includes the neighborhood store initiative alongside other projects like the Summer Food Program.

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