Rolling Grocer

Cece Graham & Michelle Hughes  The Rolling Grocer 19, 6 South 2nd Street

What Cece is reading now: Children of Blood and Bone by Toni Adeyemi 

What Michelle is reading now: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Solving a Food Crisis in Hudson

Good food is love. Good food is also the key to health. As fulltime residents of Hudson know too well, affordable food shopping was an issue after the last in-town grocery store closed, and that’s a long time ago. While we have specialty food shops, the cost issue has not met the needs of most Hudson residents. For those people with access to a car there are grocery stores outside Hudson, but for too many people lack of transportation has meant extremely limited food options for fresh vegetables and fruit, quality dairy products, bread, and meat. 

Some people have described Hudson as a food desert. Michelle Hughes says she prefers the term food apartheid. “Desert implies that it is a natural occurrence where it’s really a manmade problem. There’s food, and you can get it if you have transportation, or money, or resources, or you know where things are, and you have information, but for some people that’s just not the reality.”

Fortunately, the food landscape in Hudson has changed. The Rolling Grocer 19 trailer launched in September 2018 and the store opened in March 2019. This food access concept came out of the work of the Hudson Core Group—a group of Columbia County residents who wanted to see greater food access—which was put together by Hawthorne Valley Association and Long Table Harvest in partnership with the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation. Michelle was previously involved in earlier efforts by Hawthorne Valley to open a store here in Hudson. She wrote a business plan for a mobile truck very similar to what ended up coming out of the Hudson Core Group and this ultimately led to the opening of the store on 2nd Street. Rolling Grocer 19 is managed and staffed by Cece, Michelle, and Audrey Berman from Long Table Harvest, an organization that gleans produce from 39 local farms to supply local food pantries.

Three Shopping Tiers for Pricing

Rolling Grocer 19 is an innovative food store venture that offers tiered pricing options for member customers. The tiers are determined not only by household income, but also by household size and factors such as caring for multiple children or older parents. There are currently three price tiers with Blue as the lowest-cost tier, Orange as the middle, and Green as the retail-priced tier. Rolling Grocer fundraises to make the lower price tiers possible. Cece and Michelle point out that a shopper’s price tier can change over time depending on their individual circumstances. 

Cece says that the idea of tiered pricing came out of conversations from the Hudson Core Group. “There was a field trip to a few different iterations of what food access and food justice look like. Audrey Berman headed that up with Hawthorne Valley, Rachel Schneider and Stephen Schneider and some of the Hudson Core Group members.” The goal was to look at different pricing ideas and “figure out how to make it stable here and county-wide.”

“The idea is just to make food affordable for everyone,” Michelle says. “As far as I know there is nowhere else in the country that’s using this exact type of pricing system for a grocery store.” 

“I think it’s all about challenges,” Cece says, “and accepting and realizing that it is something that should be happening across all levels whether it’s food, or housing, or healthcare. It is a bit different to think about coming here for eggs and milk and then being asked to consider your household size, your income, and even your social situation in terms of privilege. And some people say, ‘what’s privilege?’ and it could be as simple as you having a car, because that’s a privilege.”

Michelle adds, “Since the tiered pricing was originally conceived, the three of us are constantly reviewing it, and we’ve changed the language on the factors multiple times, we’ve changed the income levels, and I’m sure it will change again soon. People aren’t used to coming into a store and thinking about their income or their social situations and how it relates to other people in the community.”

 “It’s not concrete,” Cece says. “It’s like life, like a heartbeat. You can be up, and then go down, and then go up again and so we always make sure people know that, even if they’ve been shopping here for a long time.” Cece says that sometimes a person’s income on paper is not reflective of the reality of that person’s life. “When you dive in you can see what the real struggles are.”

Michelle and Cece emphasize that the process of choosing a shopping tier shouldn’t be stressful. “The Blue Tier is vast,” Cece says. “There isn’t just one thing, there are many things. For anyone who has many generations in their home, that can be challenging, if you’re taking care of an adult parent, or a child that’s come back home, that can put anyone, even someone making very good money into the Blue. And we also tell people that if you don’t want to sign up now you can take the application home and come back. So there’s multiple ways for people to have privacy around it.” Cece adds that while we all have a need for food, “it’s a question of what’s convenient for you, what’s normal for you, what’s culturally specific for you, and how to bring all of that in here with everything else we have going on.”

The Rolling Grocer Tiered Pricing System is a reminder that we are all connected and that with some attention we can make sure that everyone can eat well. The idea is to grow this idea wider still. As Michelle says, “We’re a food access project but we’re also doing financial education for the community. As we develop we’re probably going to do more programming around that and more potential education programming even outside of the store for people to understand the tiered pricing system, how to use it, and how to choose where you shop.”

Superior Quality at Lower Prices

 “We have about 30 vendors right now,” Michelle says. “The grocery shelf-stable items come mostly from UNFI which is United National Foods. They’re the main distributors for co-ops and natural food stores. And because we’re in partnership with Hawthorne Valley, we can use their volume discount which allows us to get things much more cheaply than we could otherwise for a typical store of our size.” Rolling Grocer 19 buys from a lot of local farms for produce, meat, bread, and other items like tortillas from Nixtamal. Rolling Grocer also purchases products from other smaller regional distributors like Baldor, who supply a lot of restaurants and other stores in Hudson. “We’re just piecing it together,” Michelle adds, “because no one distributor has everything that we need.”

Cece and Michelle are open to your requests for new product ideas. You will find a suggestion sheet at the store as well as a flier indicating specials, new items, coupons for new members, and gift certificates you can buy for family members and friends. 

Employment and Volunteer Opportunities

Audrey Berman runs a program at Rolling Grocer for volunteer workers, currently seven members, both local and non-local. Volunteers work 2.5 hours twice a month and receive a 10% discount on their shopping tier prices. Volunteering is a great way to connect with neighbors and to see first-hand the impact quality food access can make in our community. Rolling Grocer also accepts applications for positions and there is a workforce investment for internships for youth with support from Columbia Greene Community College (CGCC).

Personal Stories

Michelle and Cece came to Hudson and Rolling Grocer from different food backgrounds. 

Cece’s family was originally based in Brooklyn where her mother was working as a nurse and they started visiting the Hudson area in 1989 to pick apples at harvest time. “My mom was from Jamaica,” Cece says, “and was missing the country and was missing fresh food and wanted to be more in tune with nature.” Eventually, in 1994, Cece’s family moved up to Hudson fulltime. Hudson was mostly mom-and-pop stores then, but farmers came into town with flat bed trucks to sell vegetables and fruit. “The farmers were bringing the trucks delivering produce and taking orders, and for meat too,” Cece says. “There was a huge migrant force that worked on farms. Being introduced to fresh food was something I was used to but then it changed. Being at the Rolling Grocer reminds me of how food was back then.” Cece recalls Sam’s Grocery, which wasn’t an ideal shopping environment, but was at least a reliable presence. “It was pretty rough, it wasn’t clean. But they had delivery, layaway, a credit system, and it was there 7 days a week. They had a butcher, so you had ways to get meat.” Cece has raised seven children in Hudson (“it takes a village, or a family!”) and has lived in Claverack since 2006.

Michelle grew up in New Jersey. “My dad had a big garden and my grandfather was a botanist in St. Thomas.” She studied agriculture at Rutgers University and worked on the school’s small organic farm.  She lived for ten years in Brooklyn and Queens before moving to Columbia County in 2013. She came to the Rolling Grocer through a series of fortunate connections. “When I was in the city I was working on a project with Greenmarket and GROW NYC and The Council on Environment called The New Farmer Development Project and we were working with immigrants who had experience in agriculture in their home countries and wanted to start farms in the region.” The project helped these farmers find land and get to markets in the city and find additional resources. Michelle connected to Hawthorne Valley through that work. “I just loved Columbia County. I was moving closer and closer to Prospect Park [in Brooklyn] and I was like ‘if I don’t get out of the city soon I’m going to live in the park.’” I just needed more space and working with farmers just made sense.” Michelle lived in Hudson for a number of years and now lives in Germantown. 

For both Michelle and Cece food activism comes naturally. But you don’t need to be an activist to shop there. I joined Rolling Grocer a few months ago and I have found that this is a friendly, accessible place to shop. It reminds me a bit of my time at a food co-op in Brooklyn that really was a gathering place for the community. I invite you to consider becoming a member.