How Public And Cooperative Grocers Could Transform New York City

The affordability agenda of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani electrified voters and swept his campaign to victory. A signature Mamdani campaign promise, city-owned grocery stores, also elicited huge public support. Now, a partnership of community groups, farmers, cooperatives, and food industry experts have proposed a policy framework that could help implement the campaign’s best ideas in New York City.

Convened by Community Food Advocates (CFA), an advocacy organization working on food access and infrastructure efforts throughout New York, the partnership has proposed a network of low-priced, city-owned grocery stores alongside a robust cooperative food infrastructure to feed New Yorkers. (Disclosure: the author contributed to this report.)

According to Liz Accles, Executive Director of CFA, “Access to quality food is an essential human right. We believe the government has a fundamental responsibility and an unmatched capacity to end poverty and its consequence: hunger. To that end, we advocate for high-impact public policy change that ensures all New Yorkers have access to healthy, affordable, plentiful, and culturally appropriate foods.”

New Yorkers have faced many of the same challenges as most Americans in the post-Covid grocery landscape.

Grocery prices are up 35% since 2019 and many of the top selling categories, such as eggs, soft drinks, beef and chocolate, have increased over 60% in that same timeframe. Consumption volumes have likewise decreased, as consumers pulled back spending, skipped meals, went to food banks or just went without. In New York City, prices are up on average over 40%, and the city’s thousands of independent, neighborhood and cooperative grocers are at a cost disadvantage compared to larger mass marketers that monopolize supply chains and demand rock bottom wholesale costs.

The results are that over 1.5 million, or 17.5% of New Yorkers are food insecure, including nearly 25% of residents in The Bronx. Nearly 25% of New Yorkers also live below the poverty line, especially as wage growth has fallen behind the rise in food prices. New York may be world famous for its food, but New Yorkers are not always getting enough of it.

New York City has long been leader in municipal food policy to solve for these issues.

Such efforts include values-based purchasing standards for public institutions, a robust food and climate strategy and many city-wide food access programs, including farmers markets, supermarket subsidies to sell fresh foods in underserved areas, food pantries, partially subsidized public market stalls, soup kitchens and more. A Mamdani-inspired public and cooperative grocery sector would not be starting from scratch.

In 2023, prior to the mayoral election, CFA conducted a research project, with the goal of identifying a comprehensive approach to supermarket access in NYC. CFA published the study and subsequent “NYC Full Service Grocery Access: Policy Recommendations”, which includes supermarket financing, building operator capacity, leveraging city assets, supporting alternative ownership models such as cooperatives, improving data collection, and empowering community leadership in food systems.

CFA’s new report brings in experts and advocates from across the food, cooperative and academic landscape to build on and operationalize this vision.

They outline a broader city-owned supermarket sector, alongside the development of cooperative food infrastructure, with goal of creating a solidarity economy in one of the world’s most vibrant but unequal cities.

Accles states, “The promise of NYC’s proposed city-owned supermarkets is a transformative response to the private markets’ failure to ensure affordable, quality, neighborhood-based supermarket access, especially in New York City’s low-income and gentrifying neighborhoods.”

The report starts with the Mamdani campaign’s promise of five city-owned supermarket initiative and builds from there, including a scaled-up, 20 city-owned supermarket network, alongside a complementary strategy that supports cooperative food and supply chain infrastructure development across NYC.

The CFA proposal also provides numbers on public grocery ownership, based on a joint analysis originally published in Civil Eats.

The analysis is based on the thesis that a city-owned grocery sector focused on affordability would need to be scaled up. Public subsidies would ensure living wage jobs while negotiating low wholesale costs and fully subsidizing retail markups by underwriting labor, rent, utilities and administrative costs. City-owned stores should also adopt some of the best practices of low cost, high volume operators, such as limited assortments and no-frills, warehouse-style stores. Not doing these things will limit affordability and access impact and overall viability. The north star for such an enterprise would be the U.S. military commissary system, which uses public funds to feed over a million service members daily, saving them billions of dollars every year by fully subsidizing retail markups and negotiating rock-bottom wholesale costs.

According to the report, “The current proposal for five city-owned stores, requiring a $60 million first-year investment ($10 million startup plus $50 million in annual operations), would have limited benefit and would likely deliver only 10-15% consumer savings rather than the promised 30-40% reduction. At $192,000 in weekly revenue per store, these locations would lack the buying power necessary to negotiate competitive wholesale prices, and other favorable terms resulting in a poor return on investment: $50 million annually yielding just $15-20 million in consumer savings.

“In contrast, a scaled-up network of twenty stores would require $445 million in Year 1 ($60 million startup plus $385 million in annual operations) but would deliver $400 million in annual consumer savings—$1.04 saved for every dollar invested—while creating 800-1,000 living-wage jobs. To maximize best pricing, distribution and staffing efficiencies this larger network would operate on a warehouse-style model with approximately 1,500 high-volume items rather than attempting to stock the standard 30,000 products — think Costco without bulk items— enabling genuine 38% price reductions through economies of scale, with the city providing rent-free space and tax exemptions.”

The CFA report also concludes that city-owned supermarkets alone are insufficient for lasting food systems transformation.

Power and decision making in the food system, including ownership and governance, must be based at the grassroots level, centering community members and rank and file workers. The report states that NYC must invest in cooperative ownership infrastructure to build democratic, community-controlled food businesses. It recommends that the city provide rent-free land and space for cooperative food businesses, create a startup capital fund of $116 million in Year 1 to cover construction and equipment costs, and fund cooperative development organizations at $12 million annually to support organizing, incubation, and technical assistance in each borough.

According to the report, additional strategies would include converting vacant commercial spaces into community-owned food districts, expanding successful models like RiseBoro’s Steps at Saratoga across housing developments, and supporting food related Community Land Trusts. New York City has long had a burgeoning cooperative food economy, including retailer-owned and wholesale cooperatives such as Key Food and Hunts Point Market, worker-owned cooperatives such as Brooklyn Packers , and consumer-owned cooperatives such as the nationally-renowned Park Slope Food Co-op, so the report’s recommendations also builds on popular existing initiatives.

Cooperatives demonstrate higher survival rates than conventional businesses (60-70% at five years versus 40-50%) and redistribute revenue and profits back to their communities, while developing local economies and supply chains. The total investment for cooperative expansion would be $128 million in Year 1, declining to $13 million annually in Years 2-3 and just $6 million ongoing from Year 4 forward.

Combined with the 20-store supermarket network, CFA’s comprehensive approach would require approximately $573 million in Year 1 with ongoing costs declining to roughly $391 million annually—less than 0.5% of NYC’s budget.

This strategy would address a fundamental need affecting millions of residents, namely that of food affordability and access, through meaningful price reductions, living-wage jobs, democratic ownership, and lasting food security infrastructure. It would be a small price to pay for the potential benefit to New Yorkers.

New York City is widely known as one of the greatest food cities in the world, but it is also one of the most unequal. The Mamdani mayoral victory inspired New Yorkers to imagine a new public and cooperative grocery supply chain infrastructure that could solve some of the city’s most daunting challenges, while making sure everyone has more than enough good food to eat.