With manager hired, Eat Well Sioux Falls Mobile Market nearly ready to roll

A first-of-its kind effort in Sioux Falls to bring fresh, affordable groceries to underserved neighborhoods is weeks away from serving its first customers.

The Eat Well Sioux Falls Mobile Market is in the final stages of putting both its vehicle and its program together.

“Bringing healthy, affordable food right to people — that’s really what we need in our community,” said Luke Senst, who has been hired to manage the market.

Senst most recently helped connect people with transportation needs as part of his role at the Helpline Center. Before that, he was an economic assistance benefits specialist for the state Department of Social Services. He also has been involved with Church on the Street for several years.

“And I got to see the need we have in our community — not just for food but for transportation barriers that people have,” he said. “It’s crazy how much of a food desert we have in our community when we’re the size we are.”

The Mobile Market will attempt to fill some of those gaps. After spending the summer in negotiations for a vehicle, an opportunity came up to purchase a used one that had been custom-built for food giveaways.

“And it’s going to work really well as a grocery store,” said Michelle Erpenbach, president of Sioux Falls Thrive, which is coordinating the market launch with support from a $250,000 city grant. “We’re really excited to introduce that to the community.”

It has scheduled a news conference for Oct. 6 to reveal the vehicle and will begin serving neighborhoods after that.

In the meantime, a survey is available in partnership with Augustana Research Institute to determine everything from initial inventory to convenient times to shop. To take the survey, click here.

“We’ve done some surveying talking with people in the neighborhoods and have found a couple locations that are going to work really well,” Erpenbach said. “We’ll be in two, three or four spots that first couple weeks and go from there.”

The group also went to the Twin Cities, where the closest prototype to the mobile market is in operation, and Senst has been working on sourcing inventory. He’s working with the local reduced-price grocer Fair Market for some items and reaching out to potential community partners who might be able to collaborate.

Here’s an initial list of what the market anticipates selling:

“I’ll be very busy in the next couple weeks,” Senst said. “We do have really good partnerships already with some wholesalers now.”

While he’s a one-man, full-time show for the moment, the plan is to add a couple of part-time workers to help during market events and lean heavily on volunteers.

“That’s a resource I bring with Church on the Street is we have thousands of volunteers every year helping out,” he said. “So we’ll be tapping on people to be involved in this process and sustainably — if someone can volunteer once a week on a continual basis, that’s what we’ll be looking for.”

The mobile market team has been getting the word out at neighborhood events, including one over the weekend in the Whittier neighborhood.

Senst brings the skills and background for it, Erpenbach said.

“It’s a relationship role, it’s a trust-building role, and Luke just fit that,” she said. “He fits that niche better than anybody we could find.”

Adjustments to inventory and schedule will be made as the market becomes operational and gets a better sense of the demand.

While data around local food insecurity is more than a year old, it has been revisited through research. Anecdotally, “we absolutely know, for sure, that food insecurity is on the rise,” Erpenbach said.

And while addressing the need in the short term is critical, bigger picture “I go back to workforce development,” Erpenbach said, noting that data shows at least 80 percent of people tend to continue living within a 100-mile radius of where they grew up.

“We are truly raising our future workforce because 80 percent of these kids are going to stay here, and we want them to,” she said. “We want them to grow up and be happy and raise families and be our future workforce, and this is a barrier Thrive is focused on. How do we break down that food insecurity so they can continue to thrive here?”