A Healthy (and Profitable) Oasis in Philly’s Food Deserts

A sec­ond chance for ex-offenders

After being sen­tenced to jail for five years for sell­ing drugs in his home­town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Louis Rivera was deter­mined to turn his life around. An eighth-grade dropout, he spent his first year in prison prepar­ing for and obtain­ing his GED. Upon release, he moved to Philadelphia and sent out dozens of resumes, hop­ing, at age 31, to secure the first real job of his life.

No employer responded. Louis was frus­trated and scared. “I knew I could not go back to the life I had been lead­ing,” he told me. “I needed a break.”

He walked down the street from his apart­ment to Jeff Brown’s ShopRite gro­cery store, where he had already applied online. He said to the hir­ing man­ager, “I’m not leav­ing here until you give me a job.” She laughed at his mix of pluck and des­per­a­tion, and after lis­ten­ing to his story, gave him that break: a minimum-wage job in the seafood department.

Louis had gone to the right place. He did not know it at the time, but ShopRite is the only grocery-store chain in Philadelphia, and pos­si­bly in the nation, with an explicit focus on hir­ing ex-offenders. Jeff Brown explains that these employ­ees are just as suc­cess­ful as a group com­pared to those with­out crim­i­nal records. “I have not seen evi­dence that the fears are true,” he says.

Brown believes his suc­cess with hir­ing ex-offenders is due to a strong part­ner­ship with a non­profit work­force train­ing orga­ni­za­tion, ABO Haven, that screens ex-offender can­di­dates to find those who are a good match for the grocery’s cul­ture, pro­vides train­ing in “soft skills” like how to be suc­cess­ful in a work envi­ron­ment, and then checks back in with the work­ers once they are on the jobs. From a profit per­spec­tive, hir­ing ex-offenders actu­ally saves Brown money, since workforce-training dol­lars sup­port the ini­tial screen­ing, train­ing, and follow-up.

Four years and three pro­mo­tions later, Louis is a model of the type of upward mobil­ity that is on the wane in America. As assis­tant store man­ager, he brings home $53,000 per year plus ben­e­fits. He has been able to pro­vide for his fiancée and three chil­dren, and now owns a home and two cars. He plans to stay with the com­pany, and hopes to become a store man­ager one day.

Greening food deserts

Brown is also one of the first gro­cers to rec­og­nize the prof­itabil­ity of open­ing large gro­cery stores in under­in­vested low-income com­mu­ni­ties and com­mu­ni­ties of color, which other retail­ers have fled or avoided. Six of Brown’s stores are located in areas that were “food deserts” before he opened his doors: low-income neigh­bor­hoods with­out gro­cery stores or other healthy food retail­ers. Food-desert neigh­bor­hoods tend to have higher rates of diet-related health prob­lems like obe­sity and diabetes.

One of those stores is located in West Philadelphia’s Parkside neigh­bor­hood. An African-American com­mu­nity of about 100,000, Parkside went with­out a super­mar­ket for nearly three decades.

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