‘A blessing to the community’: New Black-owned grocery opens to serve small Delta town
James Croft checks the inventory at Farmacy Marketplace in Webb, Miss., Friday, October 28, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
WEBB — Marquitrice Mangham didn’t just want to create the grocery store her hometown desperately needed. She wanted to bolster the Delta’s long-struggling food system.
Enter Farmacy Marketplace: A neighborhood grocer that isn’t just the first store in decades to offer Webb shoppers fresh meat and produce, but also a steady marketplace for small-scale farmers to sell their crops.
“A huge amount of food waste goes on in the Delta because everything is so sparsely populated,” said Mangham, who heads the nonprofit that runs the new Tallahatchie County grocery store. “No supermarket business is going to contract you to buy 20 pounds of tomatoes every couple weeks.”
But the Farmacy Marketplace can, giving the region’s struggling small-scale farmers a more reliable income and the people of Webb access to produce without driving a half-hour to the nearest grocery store.
The Mississippi Delta may be known for its fertile soil, but its major farm operations largely grow soy and corn for animal feed rather than produce the food the region’s population actually eats. There are few industries and jobs outside of agriculture. In most Delta counties, the poverty rate is between 30%-40%.
The Delta is also covered with what the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls rural food deserts: low-income tracts where a third of the population lives more than 20 miles from the nearest large grocer. Mangham hopes what she’s creating at Farmacy Marketplace will become a model for other communities.
