The Shipping Container Oasis in Food Deserts

This solu­tion is called Stockbox Grocers, and it is the brain­child of founder Jacqueline Gjurgevich and her busi­ness part­ner Carrie Ferrence. For Jacqueline, Stockbox came about as a bit of a life makeover. “Right after col­lege grad­u­a­tion, I moved to Washington, DC,” Jacqueline told Organic Connections. “I worked for Marriott International for nine years, and did sales, events and rev­enue man­age­ment. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t super ful­fill­ing; I just wanted to do more with my career than push rev­enue for a large multi­na­tional corporation.”

With her fiancé at the time, Jacqueline moved to Seattle and began anew. “A cou­ple years in, I dis­cov­ered BGI [Bainbridge Graduate Institute] and met some amaz­ing peo­ple,” she said. “I was exposed to ideas that really appealed to me, and pushed me to dis­cover what my right liveli­hood should be.”

Jacqueline enrolled at BGI, and it was there that Stockbox had its begin­nings. “Stockbox Grocers was orig­i­nally a grad school project,” Jacqueline recounted. “In our last year, we were tasked with cre­at­ing an entre­pre­neur­ship enter­prise that would show $1 mil­lion in triple-bottom-line rev­enue* within five years. Our team came together around the idea of want­ing to improve food access. At first we looked at mobile food as an option, but there are a lot of lim­i­ta­tions to that, and we wanted to build some­thing per­ma­nent in a com­mu­nity. We basi­cally took the wheels off a mobile food van and cre­ated Stockbox Grocers.”

Stockbox Grocers is a minia­ture gro­cery store arranged inside a reclaimed ship­ping container—the sort you see being hoisted onto ships for long trans­port. The store offers essen­tial gro­cery items and fresh produce.

In order to get a bet­ter idea of how they should oper­ate, Jacqueline and Carrie set up their first pro­to­type in the Delridge neigh­bor­hood of Seattle. “Our pro­to­type store was in a mobile mini-office,” Jacqueline recalled. “We didn’t actu­ally have a ship­ping con­tainer, but it was shipping-container-like in that it was eight by twenty feet, and we were able to pack it with over 300 dif­fer­ent items.”

In the eight weeks they oper­ated the pro­to­type, they learned a great deal. The first thing was how to con­vince a poten­tial cus­tomer that this was a store and it would ben­e­fit them. “People really seemed to like the con­cept once they under­stood what it was,” said Jacqueline. “It’s not every day that you shop for gro­ceries inside a place like that. We did our best to make it look like a nice retail space by putting signs on the out­side that listed items that were in the store, and arrang­ing things sen­si­bly inside. We’d invite peo­ple in, even to just come and look. We had great feedback.”

They also needed to be sen­si­tive to the items they were stock­ing. “As far as inven­tory goes, we were able to respond to what cus­tomers were look­ing for,” Jacqueline related. “We had a first round of inven­tory, and then just became flex­i­ble and adapt­able to the require­ments of the community.”

Click any image above to see a larger version.

The key ele­ment that Jacqueline and her part­ner learned, though, was the impor­tance of mak­ing friends in the com­mu­nity. “My busi­ness part­ner and I were the two that worked in the store every day, so we were able to develop very close rela­tion­ships with peo­ple,” Jacqueline said. “Being in the park­ing lot of an apart­ment com­plex, you see the same peo­ple all the time com­ing and going from work, so it was nice to be able to cre­ate those rela­tion­ships. We were able to swap recipe sto­ries, help with sug­ges­tions for din­ner and intro­duce peo­ple to food that they were maybe not always accus­tomed to. It’s about build­ing rela­tion­ships on a very per­sonal level, which you can’t do in a large gro­cery store, and peo­ple were excited about that. Our tar­get is to focus on women and families—to make a safe envi­ron­ment for peo­ple to shop in and just feel comfortable.”

Of course, the source of food for the store is impor­tant. “For the pro­to­type, we worked with a cou­ple of dis­trib­u­tors and sup­pli­ers that deal with inde­pen­dent gro­cery stores,” Jacqueline con­tin­ued. “Toward the end, we started work­ing with a few local farms to get items like pears and apples and other sea­sonal fruit. Our mis­sion is to expand into a more region­al­ized food system.”

Now that the pro­to­type is done, the inter­est has become keen from many quarters—and their first per­ma­nent instal­la­tion is in the near future. “We’ve received atten­tion from peo­ple all over the coun­try iden­ti­fy­ing with our mis­sion and what the Stockbox story is,” Jacqueline reported. “They could visu­al­ize it in their com­mu­nity, whether it is in another urban envi­ron­ment or whether it’s rural, or any­where in between. People are ask­ing for access to good food in their com­mu­ni­ties. Once we get the first per­ma­nent store on the ground and prove that our model really works, we’re going to be able to deploy it through­out the nation. We don’t want to just be in south Seattle; we want to be all over the country.”

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* triple bot­tom line—also known as “peo­ple, planet, profit” or the three pillars—is an expanded mea­sure of busi­ness suc­cess that, in addi­tion to straight finan­cial profit, also takes into account the enterprise’s treat­ment of labor and its ben­e­fit to the environment.

For more infor­ma­tion on Stockbox Grocers, visit www.stockboxgrocers.com.