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ABSTRACT
In 2001 the Food Trust, a nonprofit organization committed to ensuring access to affordable, nutritious food, focused attention on the lack of access to healthy foods in Philadelphia by creating food access maps and convening a task force. The campaign led to the creation of a statewide initiative that to date has funded seventy-eight fresh food outlets in Pennsylvania, increasing food access for 500,000 children and adults. This success has led to interest from other states and the federal government in expanding the initiative. Here we present the Food Trust's five-step framework for increasing access to fresh, healthy food in other locales.
The Food Trust is a nonprofit organization committed to ensuring that everyone has access to affordable, nutritious food. In 2001 it began to focus attention on the problem of supermarket access in Philadelphia, documenting the connection between the lack of supermarkets and deaths from diet-related disease.1 These findings sparked Philadelphia City Council hearings and the formation of the Food Marketing Task Force, a diverse group of local leaders who came together to create policy recommendations to address the so-called grocery gap.
A visionary state representative from Philadelphia, Dwight Evans, championed the notion of addressing the gap at the state level. This led to a statewide Supermarket Campaign- a strategic advocacy effort- which in turn led to the creation of the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative (FFFI), with a commitment of $30 million from the commonwealth between 2004 and 2006. 2 The initiative is now a $120 million public-private partnership that has funded seventy-four fresh food outlets throughout the state, increasing fresh food access for 500,000 children and adults.3
The rationale for this campaign and its expansion stemmed from two sources: first, a growing base of evidence that showed disparities in the location of supermarkets based on income and race;4"6 and second, a concern about growing rates of obesity, heart disease, cancer, and other diet-related diseases.
Research shows that consumers without ready access to supermarkets have more difficulty finding fruit and vegetables in their neighborhoods and pay more for these and other basic food items, compared with consumers who have access to supermarkets.4,5 Furthermore, a number of studies demonstrate that residents with supermarkets in their neighborhoods are more likely than those lacking...