Crisp! Social Enterprise Fighting Food Deserts with Mobile Grocery and Pop-Up Stores
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
The City of Chicago broadly defines a “food desert” as a census block located more than a mile from a large retail food store. More than 380,000 Chicagoans live in a food desert, and over 100,000 of those are children. About 70% of the total food desert population is African American, with the remainder split between Caucasians and Latinos. Catholic Charities is part of the solution to food deserts. We provide a wide range of nutrition programs, and one of the most recent is a “mobile grocery” service, called Crisp! Recently, Catholic Charities expanded on the Crisp! model by opening a “pop-up” store in a public housing development in Ford Heights, an economically depressed suburb of Chicago. This new form of outreach not only brings fresh, healthy food to a food desert, it has also provided jobs for community residents. Joining Monsignor Boland today are Jonathan Wittig Director of Crisp! Mobile Grocery, and Tawanna Berdin, Crisp! Sales Representative.