Supply chain issues and rising gas prices are worsening food access in the Mountain State. West Virginian entrepreneurs are looking to meet the demand for food.
The American food retail landscape is structured around hypermarkets, such as Walmart, which carry out large scale food distribution for population centers. Smaller grocery stores have provided services for rural communities. But that may be in jeopardy.
Bridget Lambert is the president of the West Virginia Retailer Association. She says smaller grocery stores are disappearing partly due to an unstable supply chain.
“They rely on food distribution networks that deliver to rural areas,” Lambert said. “About several years ago we had a large distribution center close in the Cabell County area.”
And that has filtered down to smaller locations. On April 1st, 2022, the Poca Foodfair permanently closed its doors, meaning residents have to travel to neighboring towns for the bulk of their groceries.
Jackie Dolan lives in Poca. She travels to Dunbar, Nitro, and Eleanor for her grocery shopping.
“You can’t make 2, 3, or 4 trips, you know I have to plan one whole day,” Dolan said.
The rising price of gas, and the rising costs of products are changing the shopping habits of the state’s rural residents.
“So instead of going to the store weekly, they may go bi-weekly, or once a month,” Lambert said. “Of course, the increased cost of gasoline, that money will come out of a family’s budget somewhere, and it may well come out of the food budget.”
For a long time, residents of Clay County have lived without ready access to a full service grocery store. Clay County is often considered one of the worst food deserts in the state.
In November 2021, a Par Mar store fitted with grocery products opened in Maysel to help meet the demand for a grocer.
“Usually you have to go either to Elkview or Sutton; at Kroger or the Save-a-lot, but since we got this place here, it’s helped out a whole lot,” Par Mar cashier Ethan Smith said.
Grocery aisle at the Par Mar in Maysel. Credit: David Adkins/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Aside from the Par Mar, local businesses in Clay County have helped expand food access.
Stores like House’s Supermarket in Brickmore meet the community’s grocery needs, minus certain types of fresh meat.
There’s also Legacy Foods: Market and Bakery in Indore, and the Clay County Farmers Market in Clay.
“Food desert situations have created some very unique opportunities for small business owners in West Virginia to open niche markets, ” Lambert said. “Communities are stepping up and addressing this situation in a multitude of ways.”
According to Lambert, those investing in a local food market need to know the local food landscape, such as demand, population size, store location, and distribution networks. She noted that consumers appreciate shopping close to home, meaning there is a steady demand.
There’s a picture frame on the wall next to the customer service desk in the IGA in Inez, Kentucky. Inside the frame is a scrap of beige meat-counter paper, on which a man named Derle Ousley sketched the layout for an ad announcing the opening of his very first grocery store.
“Inez Supermarket Grand Opening,” it reads. The date: September 28, 1959.
Credit Sydney Boles / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Derle Ousley sketched this ad for the grand opening in 1959.
A Mississippian by birth, Ousley moved to Martin County after he served in the Korean War and noticed that Inez, the county seat, had no grocery store. So he opened one.
The supermarket burned down twice, and was rebuilt as many times. It rebranded as the Inez IGA, and Judith Ousley, who was four when the store opened for the first time, took over from her dad.
“He died five years ago this month,” Ousley said. “I’ve tried my best to keep it going, but when the coal left, so did a lot of people. It’s rough.”
When the Inez IGA closed its doors on January 6, the deli was empty and dark. The shelves were mostly bare. Every so often, a customer trundled a rickety shopping cart through the silent aisles.
Like much of Kentucky, which has lost 63 percent of its coal jobs since 2009, Martin County has struggled economically. The county has also made news in recent years for its beleaguered drinking water system, and as the coal jobs went away, so, too, did Ousley’s customer base.
“Back in the boom days, say 30 years ago, we would do $200,000 in a week. Now it’s about $75,000.”
Credit sydney Boles
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Judith Ousley took over the store from her father, who opened it when she was just four.
The IGA wasn’t the only food option in town, but it’s close. The other, a discount store, has a limited selection that does not include much produce or many other nutritious items. With the closing of the IGA, folks in Inez must travel to another store in Warfield, 10 miles away over treacherous mountain roads, or go out of the county to chain stores 30 or 45 minutes away in Pikeville or Prestonsburg.
Sarah Congleton is already feeling the loss. “Today is the first day of the IGA being closed, and my assistant Robin is searching the county for bagels. Not even whole wheat bagels. Just bagels. And we can’t,” Congleton said.
Congleton works with the University of Kentucky extension office in Inez as the family and consumer science agent. The extension office had been working with the IGA to encourage healthy purchases, like lean meats and whole grains.
The extension office had a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to address Martin County’s high rates of diabetes and obesity. The work was hard enough with a grocery store, Congleton knew. How could she begrudge a mom on a limited budget for buying junk food she knew her kid would eat over an apple that she knew would go to waste?
Losing the store made that even harder.
“If you’re trying to combat food accessibility and then there goes your grocery store, what do we do?” she asked.
Credit Sydney Boles
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The empty deli counter and bare shelves of the Inez, KY, IGA.
Challenges and Creativity
Inez joins a growing list of rural communities across the country losing their grocery stores, as declining rural populations mean fewer shoppers, and small-town independent groceries find it hard to compete with big box chain stores.
According to an Ohio Valley ReSource analysis of U.S. Department of Agriculture data, between 2010 and 2015, 135 counties in the Ohio Valley saw an increase in the percent of the population with low access to grocery stores. That’s 51 percent of counties in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia, compared to 40 percent nation-wide. Ohio saw the greatest increase in low access at 58 percent of counties. The USDA defines low access as .5 miles or more from a grocery store in an urban area and 10 miles or more away in a rural area.
There’s no central organization tracking the closures of rural grocery stores nationwide, but Rial Carver at Kansas State University’s Rural Grocery Initiative knows it is a national problem. “We often get calls saying, ‘Okay, the grocery store just closed, what can we do?’” Carver said. Those calls come from as far away as Alaska and Maine, sometimes in the same week.
According to Carver, the largely rural state of Kansas lost about 100 rural groceries between 2008 and 2018. Declining or aging rural populations, stagnant rural wages, price competition from chain stores, and a generation of mom-and-pops retiring have all contributed to that, and the effect on the grocery’s home community can be stark.
Carver says that particularly in rural areas, grocery stores do more than just provide access to nutritious food. “They can serve as gathering places and be a place to allow for community cohesion,” Carver said. “So if the grocery store goes away, then the community loses those things.”
Credit Sydney Boles / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
The Inez, KY, IGA on its last day of business.
But there is a silver lining. Carver says that of the 100 groceries that have closed in Kansas, roughly half of them have reopened, largely due to creative thinking by community members.
“We have seen in the last couple of years more examples of different ownership models,” she said. “So instead of that traditional mom-and-pop, maybe the community steps in and owns the store, or maybe the community runs the store.”
Other communities open coffee shops inside a grocery to turn it into a community gathering place. A Florida town opened its own government-run grocery store after it lost its privately owned one, and stores in Kansas are exploring non-profit models.
Renewable Change
Eastern Kentucky is also home to some creative solutions, as one grocer attacks high energy bills in order to lower overhead costs.
About an hour south of Inez, the IGA in Isom, Kentucky, is bustling. Gwen Christon, who owns the store, noticed the same trends Judith Ousley did: declining foot traffic, lower incomes in the community, and less revenue. She raised her concerns with her account manager at Kentucky Power, the local energy utility, who happened to be a customer at her store.
A few months later, Christon had taken out a loan from the Mountain Association for Community and Economic Development. The nonprofit focuses on economic transition in coal country and, among other things, issues loans to small businesses. Christon used the loan to replace her open refrigerator cases with closed-door cases that would cost less to cool.
“Just doing that, my electric bill went down from $11,000 a month to $7,000,” Christon said.
Next, Christon replaced her roof to add more insulation, further reducing her electric bill. “And then once I get the new roof on, the next thing I want to do is go solar,” Christon added.
Back in Martin County, Ousley plans to run the IGA’s other location in Warfield for a bit, but is looking forward to retiring and starting to volunteer rocking babies at the local hospital. For her employees, the future is a little less certain. Crystal Newsome, a longtime employee, has secured a position at the Warfield IGA, but hopes to move away from her home town soon. “It’s sad, I guess. It’s just gonna be a ghost town.”
Researchers at West Virginia University are working to holistically understand “food insecurity” throughout West Virginia with a program they call WV FOODLINK.
The program is trying to connect people to food resources that already exist throughout the state, while exploring unmet needs and what might be done to fill them. It’s a moving target, but researchers say West Virginians are an innovative bunch.
According to data from the US Census Bureau, about 15 percent of all West Virginians, or about one in seven is “food insecure,” which means they have a hard time at some point throughout the year putting food on the table for lack of money, access, or resources in general. But what does that really mean? How many people in West Virginia are hungry right now? WVU researcher Bradley Wilson says the short answer is: we don’t really know.
WV FOODLINK
“The story of West Virginia is all of these statistics about obesity, health problems, poverty, depression,” said Bradley Wilson, a professor of Geography at West Virginia University. Wilson has been studying food and hunger issues and, importantly, thinking about why and how we are in our present situations.
"There's a massive network of emergency food assistance agencies serving between 200,000 – 300,000 people a month," Wilson said.
“Economic changes, the decline of manufacturing, the decline of coal – these are the cards people have been dealt and they’ve been making that work. There’s a certain creativity that is not the story of West Virginia that is often told.”
Wilson is the director of an ongoing project at the university called WV FOODLINK. When the project launched Wilson quickly came to discover more than 650 agencies working to combat hunger across the state.
“There’s a massive network of emergency food assistance agencies serving between 200,000 – 300,000 people a month,” Wilson said.
Food pantries, soup kitchens, charities, nonprofits, free school meal programs – Wilson and his team call it the Emergency Food Network – and in the WV FOODLINK labs, they’ve been gathering a lot of data to try and grasp the extent of the network. Researchers created a website to help spread information about the needs and work that’s being done around the state.
Mapping Vulnerability
But we live in a very fluid and changing world. We almost need real-time maps to keep up with the morphing food landscapes.
“This emergency food network is itself extremely vulnerable,” said Joshua Lohnas, a PHD student in the Department of Geography at WVU and the Associate Director of FOODLINK, “and we’re finding a lot of food pantries closing shop even since we started this project.”
Lohnas is observing one major trend: the rise and popularity of “alternative food networks” like farmers markets and CSAs.
But farmers markets today still only feed about 1% of the state’s population.
“Solutioning”
“We are not anti-farmers markets,” insists Wilson. “We WANT farmers markets. But how do you build both? I think that’s where a lot of the innovative stuff is happening.”
Wilson says there’s a lot of “solutioning” going on: food pantries with hydroponics operations, gardeners’ consignment shops, mobile markets, food pantries hosting farmers markets or growing their own food – these are some of the innovations we’re beginning to see in West Virginia. Wilson says it’s not likely any one solution will solve all the problems we face, more innovative work that combines the popular alternative food movement and the emergency food network is what West Virginia needs.
“The way to scale up the alternative food networks is ultimately going to have to address how to invite low income families to participate.”
