Philadelphia's Common Market wins $1.1 million grant

One in an occasional series on the demand for locally grown food and its impact on our region.

What started as an effort to bring a farmers market to Strawberry Mansion instead became a socially conscious food-distribution business bringing freshly picked, locally grown produce to schools, hospitals, and workplaces. And now Common Market, launched in 2008, has received the largest grant of its young life - $1.1 million from the Kellogg Foundation.

The not-for-profit, which started with five customers, among them Cooper University Hospital, now has 60-plus customers and works with more than 100 farmers, earning a reputation for treating growers fairly and paying them promptly. The Kellogg grant, spread over two years, will allow Common Market, located at 29th Street and Hunting Park Avenue, to get a cooler, a forklift, and a refrigerated truck, as well as retrofit its space for anticipated changes in federal food-safety regulations, said executive director Tatiana Garcias-Granados, a former investment banker and University of Pennsylvania MBA who left the Wall Street world to live and work in North Philadelphia.

More expansion is already under way. Starting next week, the company is offering affordable baskets of local produce to employees in their workplaces each week - at SEPTA's Market Street offices and at Shire Pharmaceuticals in Wayne.

And in the fall, Common Market will double the number of Philadelphia public schools it serves, from 25 to 50 of the 96 schools that have cafeterias.

"It's clear to us that Common Market is serious about getting affordable, healthy food to families and treating farmers fairly," said Linda Jo Doctor of Kellogg, which was founded by the breakfast-cereal maker and last year gave $360 million to new projects aimed at helping vulnerable children.

"What's so unique about Common Market is that the structure is truly innovative," Doctor said.

Garcias-Granados, 36, is thrilled about the recognition.

"Getting a grant from this respected foundation really validates what we are doing," she said in an interview Tuesday.

Initially, in 2003, she and other community advocates in the East Park Revitalization Alliance thought bringing a farmers market to the neighborhood would suffice to change the way people eat. But when they sought advice from Bob Pierson, a food consultant whose Farm to City business operates local farmers markets, he suggested they focus instead on filling a void in the local food-distribution system.