A Nonprofit Effort Delivers Green Groceries—and Opportunity

Street-food culture in New York has long been as vibrant and diverse as the city’s residents. Falafel, bulgogi, chorizo, jerk chicken, biryani, arepas, and other cheap and exotic dishes can be found on many street corners.

But the simplest foods—fresh fruits and vegetables—are often nearly impossible for many city residents to find or afford.

Now a new effort that got off the ground with help from a New York foundation and the city government has made low-cost fresh produce available in pushcarts that dot the five boroughs.

The New York City Green Cart program was born after city officials approached the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, a grant maker in New York, to collaborate to develop new businesses and retail outlets that would sell healthy foods.

Gail Nayowith, executive director of the fund, says the idea was appealing because it could “get healthy food to people who would not otherwise have it and to create jobs at the same time.”

The Tisch fund provides $1.5-million to the city for support of the cart program.

Most of the money goes to Accion, a Boston nonprofit organization that lends money to people who want to buy the carts, and Karp Resources, a consulting firm in New York that helps cart vendors figure out how to obtain wholesale produce and attract customers.

The Tisch grant also pays for community health educators to show residents of neighborhoods with high concentrations of people with diet-related illnesses—such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease—how to use produce from the green carts to make healthy meals.

The program soon hopes to expand its reach to poor people and is testing new electronic benefit transfer machines in 15 carts in the hopes that soon all vendors will be able to process food stamps as easily as they handle credit-card purchases.

Currently, 342 vendors operate green carts, and the program hopes eventually to enable 1,000 carts to operate across the city.

Although cart vendors do not earn a lot, most make at least the minimum wage and many earn two to three times that much, Ms. Nayowith says.

“Many of the people who are now vending are immigrants or first-generation Americans; they’re people who are really trying to get a foothold in the economy and start a small business. And just like the waves of immigrants before who pushed carts on Orchard Street in Lower Manhattan and went from pushcart to storefront to a small number of stores to chains, many of the vendors are looking at the green carts as part of the American dream.”

More photos from the Green Carts program are below.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.