In 2010, REV Birmingham’s Taylor Clark and her late partner Sam Crawford stared down the food situation in Birmingham.
They were looking at a report — just figures, really — but behind those figures were 23,000 children and 65,000 adults who didn’t and don’t have access to food other than convenience store offerings or fast food.
Those two people looked across the survey’s 88,000 faceless neighbors spread across 43-square-miles of Birmingham’s food deserts and thought, “How in the world are we going to begin to address this issue?”
Five years later the result is REV’s Urban Food Project (UFP), and it’s blooming.
After joining the project last year as farm-to-store coordinator, Raghela Scavuzzo with the help of others drives the UFP’s new “Sam” truck. She delivers to Birmingham eateries like Cafe Dupont and Silvertron as well as corner stores like City Meats & Vegetables in Woodlawn.
City Meats is the main pilot store and first official partner of the UFP’s Farm to Corner Store initiative in June 2014. The full list of official partners (as of April) included Vacca Discount Drugs; Munchie’s Food Shop in Avondale; Munchie’s Chevron in Titusville; Dan’s Grocery in Grasselli; Hooper City Convenience Store; Kings Food Store; and Tenth Avenue Deli.
Creating partnerships took patience and written agreements, Scavuzzo said. “What’s been great is that the newer stores are signing [the agreements] first-on,” she said. The Farm to Corner Store Initiative, she notes, was “a growing experience: “We were building those relationships, and now [the original stores] have signed the partnership agreement[s].”
The year-long agreements — breakable at any time by either party with no sanctions, essentially create a working model for moving food from one party to the other and then to the people who need the food. “We agree to sell fruits and vegetables as the corner store,” Scavuzzo said, describing the agreements. “REV Birmingham agrees to help us market, merchandise them, get us a permanent display, provide marketing materials, technical assistance, track sales for us.”
If a partnership breaks up, any marketing material not purchased as an investment by the stores themselves, like the matching tiered baskets one storeowner surprised Scavuzzo with one day, are returned.
At the roots – facts and relationships
The UFP has come a long way from the time of its conception to actively maintaining relationships between REV and the stores. When it began, before there was a truck, Clark was delivering the vegetables herself, slinging turnips out of her personal Toyota Scion. She’s quick to downplay that and to give credit to the community for making the project work.
Before the turnip slinging could begin, however, REV commissioned a report, “Examining the Impact of Food Deserts and Food Imbalance on Public Health in Birmingham, Alabama.” The report is still available online.
The survey found the large number of people living in areas with limited access to healthy food, the 88,000, “alarming” and presented “empirical evidence that living in a Birmingham area with Food Desert or Food Imbalance conditions impacts quality and length of life.”
With those facts assembled, in 2010 Clark and Crawford began building relationships with Alabama farmers.
“They started with what they called the Southwest market and they focused on farmers markets,” Scavuzzo said.
Along the way they spent time with growers building the personal pipeline needed to establish a produce pipeline, which would pump fresh, healthy food into areas all over Birmingham.
Farmer Dwight Hamm of Hamm Farms remembers meeting Taylor Clark. “Taylor actually met me at the Pepper Place first,’ Hamm said. “Then she called me and wanted to buy some stuff, and [we] haggled a little while and got that growing.”
As a result of such connections Scavuzzo was able to drop off Gala apples — courtesy of Papajohn Wholesale Produce — in April to Tanji Frost at Vacca Discount Drugs.
“She’s so cool,” Scavuzzo said. “She’s the defining factor that sells produce there.”
Frost made sure to ask Scavuzzo to tell her the type of apples she was dropping off so she could tell her customers.
“Folks won’t buy it unless they know I’ve … tried it first,” Frost said. Once she tried the satsuma and recommended them to her customers, they sold out.
It was the same situation with plums. It wasn’t until Scavuzzo said, “Tell them they need to get the darker ones for the sweeter taste” that customers bought them.
It’s all about relationships between REV and the farmers and the stores, and between the stores and their customers.
As the links between food producers and consumers have strengthened, so has the bottom line for the farmers. Scavuzzo estimates that the first year, growers took in $2,000 in revenue, $35,000 the next and $50,000 last year.
Building a healthy demand
When the UFP first tried getting farmers to sell directly to corner stores, it didn’t work. Not enough demand from stores equaled not enough incentive for farmers. So the UFP took the tactic of creating more demand through local restaurants. Now Sam the truck delivers to both stores and restaurants.
Similar initiatives have worked in other cities like Philadelphia, Denver and St. Louis.
Birmingham’s program also has something not all urban food programs do: a hub. REV’s Chief Operating Officer Elizabeth Barbaree-Tasker said that the bricks-and-mortar Urban Food Hub is “our hub for business growth. We love helping food-related entrepreneurs, not only corner store owners, but also farmers and other people who are interested in promoting food in this city.
Scavuzzo said that the building also serves an important role in the system related to supply and demand.
“There’s a very precise system,” she said, gesturing around the space. “The farmers drop the product off here. It’s laid out on the table. We check it in against a list that says this is what they were supposed to deliver. It’s then broken down by restaurant, corner store — where it’s supposed to go — and it then receives a specific label that says what farm it came from, where its going on what day of delivery and then it’s processed into the cooler where it’s labeled for that specific location.”
For Scavuzzo the project is hands-on, but the UFP makes it easy for restaurants with an automated online ordering program that tells restaurant staff what’s available from the 20 or so farmers REV partners with. With just a few clicks the system sends Scavuzzo out on schedule with the goods.
She drives the 10,000+ lb. truck herself every week. In addition to fruits and vegetables, she delivers five gallons of local honey to Slice Pizza for its pizza dough sourced from Jimmy Carmack’s farm.
“It’s great!” Carmack said of the project. “We like to get in restaurants and different locations, and they’ve been getting it out.”
“Getting it out” began with Clark and Crawford. Clark said she thinks Sam Crawford would be as proud of the progress as she is.
“There are days,” she said, “when I realize how far we still have to go” — citing this as a small piece of a much bigger solution to a huge challenge — “but that’s the fuel that keeps pushing us forward, collectively passionate.”
Overcoming doubt
Some people believed that fruit wouldn’t sell at City Meats, Scavuzzo says. “So we moved it by the cash register where it started selling.”
The fruit had taken the space formerly occupied by a perennial seller, candy. After location made the difference in produce sales, store owner Randy Newell moved a second cooler up front.
Newell is now a believer. “Yeah, it should be here to stay,” he said.
Scavuzzo can give you some clear reasons why the Urban Food Project will stay, and it’s as simple as supply and demand. She illustrates her point with a story about a different storeowner, also named Randy.
“[Munchie’s Owner] Randy Shunnarah was saying, ‘You know I’m making more money off my fruits and vegetables,’ so he started moving his candy off the front of the cash register. And then he gave us a chip display at the front of the store. And then he let us move in a permanent Whole Foods display,” Scavuzzo said. Whole Foods also is a partner with the UFP program.
Shunnarah’s customers are buying the whole foods. In a recent period, from a Wednesday to a Monday, Munchie’s Food Shop went through 170 plums and 125 bananas.
That’s 170 more plums and 125 more bananas than have ever sold in that store.
They weren’t even in that store in 2010 when Crawford and Clark began traversing farmers markets around the city or in 2013 when Clark was single-handedly slinging turnips and tomatoes out of the back of her Scion.
The story has been modified to correct the reference to the satsuma, and to clarify the incorrect impression that Hamm Farms had provided Gala apples to Vacca Discount Drugs.