The Boxcar Grocer: Sustainable Corner Market

Getting Back to the Land

Prior to The Boxcar Grocer, Alison and Alphonzo were liv­ing very dif­fer­ent urban lives in San Francisco. Alphonzo, who had a master’s degree in film and video, had spent 13 years in adver­tis­ing, fash­ion retail, and night­club man­age­ment. Alison had a degree in archi­tec­ture, had also stud­ied film and video, and had worked with such esteemed com­pa­nies as renowned adver­tis­ing agency TBWA\Chiat\Day.

They had a deep famil­ial con­nec­tion to Georgia, how­ever. For gen­er­a­tions their fam­ily had owned 165 acres of land there—land that, although they didn’t live on it, Alison and Alphonzo loved to visit and trea­sure. “My gen­er­a­tion was the first gen­er­a­tion that did not live there, but that’s where we always went for fam­ily reunions and just get-togethers,” Alison Cross related to Organic Connections. “It was beau­ti­ful land—had a stream run­ning through it; I mean, it was gor­geous. When I was a kid, my grand­par­ents had horses and chick­ens and grew their food there.”

In 2008, a dis­tant relative—against the wishes of Alison, Alphonzo and other fam­ily members—forced the sale of the land. For the two sib­lings it was a tremen­dous loss, and it went a long way toward inspir­ing the cre­ation of The Boxcar Grocer. “We really wanted that con­nec­tion to the land to be reestab­lished,” said Alison. “We wanted Boxcar Grocer to be known as work­ing with local farm­ers, known as valu­ing the land, what the land can pro­duce, how it can keep us healthy, what it means to be healthy and con­nected to the land.”

The Need for Healthy Food

But another inspi­ra­tion for The Boxcar Grocer was more prac­ti­cal. When Alison and Alphonzo made their vis­its to Atlanta, they could find no food to match up to their home turf in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Every time we’d come, it was such a chore to find healthy food here,” Alison con­tin­ued. “In the Bay Area it’s just so abundant—it’s very easy to eat healthy. You’ve got veg­e­tar­ian restau­rants; you’ve got vegan restau­rants; you have access to all kinds of good food.

“So for us it was a real eye-opener to come down here and see the health issues that our fam­ily mem­bers and many oth­ers were hav­ing around nutri­tion, as well as many nutrition-related dis­eases like dia­betes. If they were get­ting older, there was also hyper­ten­sion and a lot of pre­ventable stuff.”

Do It Yourself

Alison and Alphonzo thought that they couldn’t be the only ones search­ing for great food in the area. They arrived at a solu­tion: open a local store in a build­ing their fam­ily already owned. The prop­erty was there, so the next step would be sim­ply to find some­one to set up a store and run it.

It turned out to be a big­ger chal­lenge than that. “We kept ask­ing our prop­erty man­age­ment com­pany to put out feel­ers,” Alison said. “They let peo­ple know, ‘We need a store here. Is there any­one?’ We couldn’t find any­body who wanted to estab­lish a store in the neigh­bor­hood, not one person.

“So we thought, ‘You know what? We’re just going to do it our­selves.’ We were a lit­tle bit naïve,” Alison laughed. ‘Alfonzo and I thought we’d open the store, leave some­one else to man­age it, and go back to our lives in California.”

They dis­cov­ered what many do—if you want some­thing done right, do it your­self. So they stayed, open­ing the first Boxcar Grocer in October 2011. And there they have been ever since.

Click any image to enlarge.

Crucial Step of Branding

They decided that if they were going to under­take such a ven­ture, they would bring their con­sid­er­able com­bined edu­ca­tion to bear and make it really worthwhile.

“We started off with the brand­ing aspect of it,” Alison explained. “My brother and I both have back­grounds in adver­tis­ing, so we looked at it as a design prob­lem. In approach­ing it as a design problem—not as a phil­an­thropy or char­ity problem—we looked for things that would spur other busi­nesses like this to open up. One major fac­tor was that it be a for-profit enter­prise, because it needed to be a sus­tain­able busi­ness that would entice other peo­ple to open this instead of a tra­di­tional con­ve­nience store with prod­ucts that would stay on the shelf for years.

“Then we addressed how to con­struct a brand around food that has never been seen before, a brand that would be able to move flu­idly within a num­ber of com­mu­ni­ties and res­onate with everyone—all types of income lev­els and com­mu­ni­ties. Something that black peo­ple would say, ‘This is about me,’ as much as a white per­son would say, ‘Oh, this is about me too,’ and as much as the Latino per­son could say it also. We came up with the idea of the train, because the train con­nects peo­ple. Throughout the coun­try it con­nected peo­ple to food, which was brought into the city by train. It also con­nects us back to the sort of rural idea of going home to family.

“So that was the start­ing point. Once we got that and came up with the name Boxcar Grocer, we envi­sioned these small lit­tle stores that could be on every cor­ner. We thought, ‘Boxcar—yeah, train; it trav­els and it really is about peo­ple con­nect­ing to health, which is the final destination.’

“We are build­ing a brand that is strong enough to res­onate in any com­mu­nity. It’s sim­i­lar to McDonald’s in that they can build a McDonald’s in Paris that looks gor­geous and beau­ti­ful, but McDonald’s can also be in West Oakland. The cal­iber of the store might not be the same, but it’s still the same brand—the brand is fluid among com­mu­ni­ties. Ultimately we will be able to go into any com­mu­nity, regard­less of income level, and the store will res­onate and the local prod­ucts will reflect what the demo­graph­ics of that area desire.”

For Alison and Alphonzo that train is now roar­ing down the track, as they aim to open their sec­ond and sub­se­quent stores. “When we look around at the com­mu­ni­ties that we want to grow into, there’s either noth­ing there at all or there’s just a store that says ‘Food Mart’ and noth­ing else—or it’s the gas sta­tion. We have to show that there is a demand for this type of food, that there is money in these com­mu­ni­ties where these kinds of stores haven’t been for many years. There is a den­sity of pop­u­la­tion in those com­mu­ni­ties who want and deserve healthy food, nutri­tious food.”

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit www.boxcargrocer.com.