BENNINGTON — Kitty Sausville, 64, remembers when Bennington had multiple grocery stores downtown.
During her teens, in the 1970s, there was P&C Food Market just a third of a mile from the town hall. About three blocks away was a Grand Union supermarket. A little over a mile to the east, on Main Street, was Williams’ IGA Market, to name just three.
“All of our grocery stores were downtown,” Sausville said. “Everything was right there in this little area.”
But by the 1990s, when she’d become a mom and was running a child care center out of her home, she said all those stores had closed. They were replaced by other businesses, or their buildings sat empty.
Sausville, who retired nearly a decade ago because of a joint disease, lives by herself in a subsidized apartment downtown. To pick up groceries nowadays, she drives to Hannaford, Price Chopper or Walmart, located in a new commercial area 2 to 3 miles from the town center.
Downtown Bennington has become a “food desert,” an area where people have limited access to healthy, affordable food. That is especially a problem for low-income households and people who don’t have a vehicle to reach grocery stores outside downtown.
A group of local residents wants to change that.
They’ve formed a new nonprofit, Four Corners Community Market, which they believe will make food shopping less burdensome to residents like Sausville. After a year of work, members of the organization plan to unveil in late January the fruits of their labor: the Bennington Community Market at 239 Main St.
The market, located a couple minutes’ walk from the town’s landmark Four Corners intersection, would be Bennington’s first downtown grocery store in a generation. Its product list will include fresh fruits and vegetables, meat, grains, dairy products, maple syrup, beer and wine.
Building a network
Local residents conceived of the market in response to multiple food-related issues in the area.
“There’s been, really, a traditional market failure, in that there isn’t a grocery store that’s knocking on our door, saying, ‘We want to come to downtown Bennington,’” Shannon Barsotti, the town’s community development director and a proponent of the community market, told VTDigger in the fall of 2021. “So if we wanted to have one, we really have to create it ourselves.”
Bennington is hardly alone. Nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s most recent supermarket access report, 39.4 million people — 12.8% of the country’s population — were living in low-income areas with limited food access.
The Grand Union supermarket in Bennington, which closed in the ’90s, was the community’s last grocery store downtown, said Tyler Resch, an author of multiple books about Bennington County and former research librarian at the Bennington Museum.
In a story that’s familiar in many Vermont communities, he said grocery stores began disappearing from downtown with the rise of supermarkets, which set up shop outside the city center because they needed more space for their bigger inventory. At the same time, car ownership grew, and customers could drive miles away to shop.
Organizers said the Bennington Community Market will help local food producers, in addition to consumers. They plan to source produce, meat, dairy and most other goods from farms and food producers from surrounding towns in Vermont, Massachusetts and New York. So far, the market organizers said, at least 40 small producers have already expressed interest in becoming suppliers.
They include Hill Top Farm in Pownal, a family operation that produces beef, chicken and pork, and Green Mountain Aquaponics of North Bennington, which grows microgreens.
Having a good outlet for foods grown and raised nearby should help build the local food economy, said the market’s board chair, Aila West. She is also the assistant director of Bennington College’s Center for the Advancement of Public Action.
The community market’s suppliers would include organic food producers, which some people associate with higher prices, but West said the store aims to offer more affordable options, too.
One way, she said, is by buying surplus farm products that cost less.
Another is by optimizing the market’s food supply, thereby minimizing waste. Once grocery products approach their best-by date, they’ll be moved from the shelves to the market’s in-house commercial kitchen, where they’ll be whipped up into meals that customers can grab to go or eat onsite.
“I think part of the system that we have here will help us be able to keep our costs down, because there’s less waste,” West said in an interview alongside market board member Tom Blakely, general manager Diana Shepherd and grocery manager Riley Flynn.
A history of cars and furniture
When a VTDigger reporter and photographer visited the market building in late November, several tables, chairs and benches were already situated around the forthcoming store, which covers 2,500 square feet.
The building previously housed LaFlamme’s furniture store, which operated there from 2014 to 2018, according to newspaper archives.
Before that, from the 1920s to 2004, it was the site of various car dealerships; the last one was Alcaro Motor Sales. The oldest part of the building dates back to the 1880s, when it was the Dewey homestead barn, historical data from the Bennington Town Offices show.
Now, empty wooden shelves and crates, coolers and a wine rack occupy what will become the community market’s retail space. A cash register sits on a counter by the kitchen area, which is already filled with equipment for cooking and food preparation.
The market has raised about $510,000 of the $550,000 it needs to cover all startup expenses, said Barsotti, the town’s community development director. Funding so far includes about $220,000 in donations, a $200,000 loan from the Bennington town government, grants of $35,000 each from Citizens for Greater Bennington and the Vermont Community Foundation, and $20,000 from the state.
Keeping food insecurity in mind
In a county where 11 out of 100 people experience food insecurity, according to 2020 figures from the nonprofit group Feeding America, the community market is setting up a program that would help alleviate that hardship.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food insecurity as the lack of consistent access to enough food for every person in a household to live an active and healthy life.
Through its fresh food access fund, partly supported by annual membership fees, the market will distribute gift cards to people who are facing food insecurity.
“They’re welcome to buy whatever they want,” West said.
She said the market will also accept payments via the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
The Bennington County Hunger Council said the community market’s presence will support the council’s efforts to combat food insecurity. People who can’t drive to grocery stores away from downtown will now have an alternative to the local food pantries. They’ll also have a larger window of time to shop, since pantries have relatively short hours, and they will have more food choices.
The market brings another benefit that may be less apparent to shoppers.
“People aren’t segregated out if they’re lower income,” council co-chair Linda Darlington said. “So there’s that dignity piece that comes with it, as well.”
The market is accessible to bus riders. It’s less than a minute’s walk from a stop that commuters can request on the Green Mountain Express. It’s on the same bus line that connects with numerous residential neighborhoods, social service organizations and health care centers.
Darlington said reducing the stress of where to get affordable, healthy food can also help families focus their energy on other areas of life. For instance, parents may have more time for their children’s school activities, and seniors may find more opportunities for social activities.
A sense of community
The market’s tentative business hours are from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day, said Shepherd, the general manager.
Once the shopping hours end, the market’s board and staff plan to transform the store into a venue for events, such as cooking classes and wine tastings.
Blakely, the board member, could see it becoming like the country store of olden days, a town’s social center. “It’s where you went to get the news and meet friends,” he said. “Nothing builds community like food, and nothing works better to do that than local food.”
The Bennington County Regional Commission believes the community market would help revitalize the downtown area. It would encourage more people to live in the city center, particularly since the attraction of downtown living is being able to accomplish everyday tasks without having to drive everywhere, said commission chair Bill Colvin.
“It was a critical missing piece in the recent redevelopment cycle of downtown Bennington,” he said.
At the same time, Colvin said, the community market is also benefiting from recent downtown revitalization projects. For instance, the Putnam Block infrastructure project, located at the Four Corners, has brought new businesses and residents to the heart of downtown Bennington.
Sausville, who saw the demise of Bennington’s downtown grocery stores decades ago, said she will check out the community market once it opens. She receives just under $900 in disability benefits each month, which covers her food, along with car insurance, gas, phone, cable TV and internet.
“Whoever’s got a sale, I run there and grab it,” she said. “I’ve got a budget, and I need to stick to it or I don’t have enough money to make it through the month.”
Besides looking for good deals, she’d appreciate driving shorter distances, given today’s gas prices.
At the downtown market, “even if I ended up paying a couple cents more,” she said, “it was going to save me on gas.”