Providers of affordable groceries find food insecurity on the rise

As a college student, Colleen Lawrence shops at places like Fair Market to help stretch her budget.

“It feels like even Walmart has gotten more expensive since I’ve been in college,” Lawrence said. “I was legitimately shocked at Fair Market; I got things for one-fourth the price I’d pay other places.”

She and others like her are the reason Greg and Kristin Johnson opened the Fair Market grocery in 2021 to sell groceries at reduced prices. Empower Sioux Falls brought the business in 2022.

“The first couple of years have been a steady march in growth. We started as one 1,900-square-foot store and now have two stores with a total of more than 10,000 square feet,” said Kristin Johnson, who serves as executive director. “Sales continue to grow as well, and our customer base continues to expand. Almost daily, we have someone tell us it’s their first time in.”

Johnson said new customers are a constant in the store and she has seen a steady growth pattern in the past three years.

“Summer is often when we hear more stories of desperation because the kids are home from school. That leads to an enormous increase in grocery bills for the household.”

She believes that the cost of essentials digs deeply into budgets.

“We do hear many stories from our customers about how the ends aren’t meeting anymore or have not been for some time,” Johnson said. “This causes more choices about eliminating goods or services that would have been normally part of everyday life.”

Fair Market continues to search for deals on a variety of goods and provides healthy, gluten-free and vegan options, Johnson said.

Lawrence said she tried to eat vegan for almost a year but found the cost was too great for her tight budget. 

“I have another friend who literally said he and his girlfriend can’t afford Walmart anymore,” Lawrence said. “Alternative groceries like here or Aldi really help.”

On top of the focus on affordable healthy options, Johnson said Fair Market stores expanded their hours to help with access to their food. 

“We also say yes to anything we can give away for free to help our customers save money and take home more value for their dollar,” she said. 

Michelle Erpenbach, president of Sioux Falls Thrive, said the organization’s 2023 report shows almost 17 percent food insecurity for children in Minnehaha County.

“That holds fairly steady in the current reporting. The Census Bureau Household Pulse survey shows food scarcity at 5.6 percent in South Dakota in January and 10.8 percent in May,” Erpenbach said. “Thanks to our relationship with Augustana Research Institute, we learned that the June data showed 9.3 percent of South Dakota households report food scarcity.”

Erpenbach said there is a direct correlation between poverty rates and food insecurity. Almost 57 percent of people living below the poverty line also live in identified food deserts, which lack convenient access to fresh food, compared with just over 34 percent of the city population overall. Click for the USDA definition of a food desert.

“Anecdotally, we know our friends at Feeding South Dakota and Faith Temple Food Giveaway are seeing increasing numbers of guests at their various food giveaway locations, particularly as post-pandemic inflation set in,” she said.

Sioux Falls Thrive is the community’s “cradle-to-career” workforce development initiative, but food insecurity is part of it, she said.

“It’s our designated role in the community to provide strategic work that impacts the success of all our children using a collective impact model,” Erpenbach said. “We use a consensus-building collaborative style to discover new solutions in three key areas: out-of-school time, affordable housing and food security.”

Thrive’s volunteer teams consist of community leaders, advocates and stakeholders, aiming to tackle food insecurity and look at it from a systemic perspective.

“Sioux Falls is a wonderfully generous community with lots of caring people and programs trying to help. But while we’re program rich like that, we are systems poor,” Erpenbach said. “It’s Thrive’s role to break down the silos we all sometimes get into.”

Thrive’s Community Food Security Network launched the Eat Well Sioux Falls Mobile Market pilot program last year and is working  with the city Health Department to establish this comprehensive food security system.

An elderly customer named Vikki who stopped by recently said she finds the prices “so much better” and that they help her feed herself and her family healthier foods. 

“The big work right now is developing some kind of centralized way to track access to excess produce, which will reduce food waste and increase food access,” Erpenbach said. “There are enough hungry children in this community that we don’t have to be in competition to feed them.”

One of the weekly stops for the Mobile Market is from 1 to 6 p.m. Fridays at Lowell Elementary, 710 W. 18th St. The truck parks on Prairie Avenue between 17th and 18th streets on the west side of the school.

To see other stops for the Mobile Market, click here.