CHARLOTTE, N.C. (CN) — Chris Peake remembers growing up in West Charlotte in the 1970s. As a boy, he worked at the Mr. Quick store on South Hoskins Road in the Thomasboro-Hoskins neighborhood.
Working in the shadow of a bustling egg-processing facility behind Mr. Quick, Peake cleaned the parking lot every day until it was spotless. He spent his earnings on arcade games and food at the store.
Growing up, Peake didn't have to worry about access to fresh food. John's Grocery Store was just up the road from Mr. Quick. There was another grocer up on Bradford Road. Trucks lined up at the egg factory, highlighting the link between Peake's home neighborhood and the region's farms and food sources.
It was a thriving community with everything it needed in one place. "This was like 'Happy Days,'" Peake, now 53, recalled last week in an interview with Courthouse News. But the community has changed since then, Peake said as he stood in the Mr. Quick parking lot. And with those changes came a sharp decline in healthy food options for local residents.
It started in the ’80s, when larger supermarket chains arrived in the neighborhood, bringing new competition. Local grocers struggled to keep up and shut down. Then the larger supermarket chains left, too.
Fast forward to today, and the Thomasboro-Hoskins community has few if any options for fresh food and produce. Even the egg-processing plant is gone, its old lot left vacant for years.
The Hoskins neighborhood — like many parts of Charlotte’s West Side and other Black neighborhoods — is now considered a food desert, lacking immediate access to fresh and affordable food options. Only 1.2% of the neighborhood’s housing units are within a half-mile of a full-service chain grocery store. Compare that to the county-wide average of 30.4%.
Now, at the site of the old egg-processing plant on South Hoskins Road, the nonprofit Carolina Farm Trust has begun construction of what it envisions as a potential part of the solution. The facility will one day become a 20,000-square-foot grocery store and distribution center — one that backers say could serve as a model for lifting up the whole food system, from small regional farmers to residents in food deserts.
The facilities will be locally staffed and feature produce from regional farms. It will have a commercial kitchen and a wholesale distribution center, where the Farm Trust will create and distribute its own products sourced from those partner farms.
The kitchen and distribution center will complement and help fund other services at the facility, including a butchery and meat processing center. That’s on top of public-facing amenities for the West Charlotte community, including a retail grocery store, a public teaching kitchen and community event space.
The goal is to do more than just build a grocery store, says Carolina Farm Trust CEO Zack Wyatt. Instead, he argues the project will help build up infrastructure for a bigger vision: a whole new local food system that lifts up local farms and gives all communities sustainable access to healthy foods.
“Part of what we’re trying to do is create a system where we’re actually meeting the need” for healthy, nutritious and accessible food, Wyatt said. Wyatt and other backers want to make the project self-sustaining, so that “we’re not waiting on a volunteer, we’re not waiting on a [corporation] to give a donation, we’re not waiting on the public to give a donation.”
For Peake, the local resident, the plan represents a sort of full-circle moment. He will helm the facility as its general manager, returning to the egg-processing facility that once loomed over him as he cleaned the parking lot at Mr. Quick as a boy.
