Overview:
FreshLo Market plans to open its first nonprofit grocery store in Denver's Montbello neighborhood this summer.
About a month ago, Dianne Cooks sat in her Montbello apartment with no way to get groceries. As a senior with a disability, she relies on her children to drive her to Walmart, but they were at work.
“I just thought about it, and I cried,” Cooks said. “Because there’s no store here. This is pitiful.”
Cooks considered walking to the nearby 7-Eleven, but she knew it would not have what she needed: fresh produce, healthy ingredients and affordable groceries.
For years, residents in Montbello have said the same thing. The northeast Denver neighborhood has long been considered a food desert, with few nearby options for affordable, nutritious food.
Now, the Montbello Organizing Committee hopes to change that. This summer, the nonprofit intends to open its first FreshLo Market in a strip mall building across the street from FreshLo Hub, a mixed-use housing and retail development off Albrook Drive. The grocery store will be within walking distance of more than 1,000 housing units and will offer fresh food at prices 15% to 30% lower than traditional grocery stores.
The Montbello location will be the first in what organizers hope becomes a broader network of nonprofit grocery stores across Denver. Donna Garnett, CEO of the Montbello Organizing Committee, said the store is the result of years of conversations with residents.
“Invariably, people were like, the main thing is we want a grocery store, right here, where we can get to the grocery store,” Garnett said. “We can walk to it, we can take the bus to it, whatever.”
The Montbello Organizing Committee, often called MOC, has spent more than a decade organizing around issues in northeast Denver. Garnett said access to food consistently emerged as one of the community’s top concerns.
“If you live right there in those apartments,” Garnett said, “what it may mean is that you shop down the block at the 7-Eleven for groceries, because there’s a good chance you don’t have any transportation to the closest grocery store that’s six miles away.”
Cooks lives in the FreshLo Hub Residences, an affordable housing complex developed by MOC. Once the store opens, she will be able to walk next door to buy groceries.
“That’s gonna help us mentally and physically,” Cooks said. “To go into a store, knowing I can go in there and get me some fresh fruit or whatever that they have in there. That’s gonna be really good for the community.”
Mersi Canales, who lives near the future store, said in Spanish that many of her neighbors have depended on buses to reach grocery stores farther away. She argued that these transportation costs create another burden for residents already struggling to pay for food.
“In the past I’ve depended on public transportation, like many of my neighbors,” Canales said. “On a day I would go grocery shopping, I had to plan for three or four hours between being in the store and waiting for the bus.”
The Montbello store is expected to be the first of at least three FreshLo locations in Denver. Organizers also plan to convert existing grocery spaces in Sun Valley and La Alma-Lincoln Park into FreshLo stores. A fourth location at the Clayton Early Learning campus on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is still being explored.
Garnett said traditional grocery chains have repeatedly shown little interest in opening stores in lower-income neighborhoods.
“It is a well-established fact that in Denver and across the country that large grocery chains are not willing or interested in coming into low-income communities,” Garnett said. “They can’t make the profit margin that they need.”
Instead of relying entirely on sales, FreshLo will operate as a nonprofit model supported by grants, donations and discounted food sourcing. Garnett said the stores are expected to generate about 60% of their revenue through product sales, with the remaining 40% coming from philanthropic support.
“The nonprofit piece is no joke,” Garnett said. “It requires intentional effort to raise money.”
The model is designed to keep prices lower while also allowing the stores to pay living wages and benefits to employees from the surrounding community.
“More and more people are in a situation because of the quickly rising cost of food that they can’t afford food,” Garnett said. “We heard in those focus groups from kids who said they rarely get another meal other than the school lunch.”
Garnett said FreshLo is also working to ensure customers can use Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, and the organization hopes to eventually create partnerships that would allow Medicaid or health insurance providers to help cover some grocery costs.
Garnett outlined short-term, medium-term, and long-term objectives for the new grocery store. The first goal is straightforward: people should have access to affordable, healthy food to feed their families. Medium-term goals include more grocery stores and more job opportunities for community members to work within them.
“The long term is that instead of 48% of our folks in this community having a nutrition-related disease, they will see that drop,” Garnett said. “That people will no longer have diabetes, or be at risk for hypertension or have heart problems when they could have had a decent diet that prevented them from being in that position.”
The store is still under construction, and Garnett said the opening timeline depends on how quickly the nonprofit can raise the remaining money it needs.
“I would give almost everything I own if it opens in June,” Garnett said. “And I won’t cry if it opens in July.”
For Cooks, though, the exact opening date matters less than the fact that it is finally happening.
“People are looking forward to that store,” Cooks said. “You know, when we talk about the FreshLo, they’re like, ‘It’s a long time coming.’ So now that it’s getting ready to take place, people are excited about it.”
