ATLANTA, GA – The cost of living continues to climb, which makes things difficult if you’re a senior living on a fixed income.
Help is here in the way of a new Atlanta grocery store that provides all of its merchandise free to seniors.
Goodr Grocery Store opened the doors to the grocery store last month in a partnership with Lutheran Towers in Midtown Atlanta. For five days a week, the store offers fresh vegetables and fruit, meats, canned goods, beverages, cleaning supplies, personal care products, and health care products. And in keeping with the desire to provide healthy offerings, many of the products in the store are low-sodium and sugar-free. And this is all for free.
Jasmine Crowe, the founder CEO of Goodr, said in an op-ed for Newsweek that she was inspired to open the store by the work she has done helping provide healthy food for the elderly.
“We knew from my work with seniors that a lot are experiencing food insecurity,” she wrote. “I personally have been working with seniors for 10 years; providing food in senior homes and buying groceries for individuals myself. One thing I thought about is how seniors have more time; a lot of them are retired. So I wanted to make the store something that they could really spend some time in.”
Goodr was formed in February 2017 with the goal of preventing food waste and hunger by recovering surplus food from businesses and distributing it to people in need. Celebrating the company’s fifth anniversary Thursday, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens praised the progress of the startup.
“We’re talking about 30 million meals have been served,” Dickens said. “Five million pounds of food diverted from landfills. That saves our environment for the future.”
The results of the five years are pop-up markets with free groceries in food desserts, grocery and meal delivery, school snack programs and the Goodr Grocery Store which opened Jan. 19 at 727 Juniper Street NE.
Beyond simply providing food, the store looks to expand the palates of its shoppers.
“It was important for us to help introduce people to new foods, so we’re having live tastings where we’ll have a chef come in and give the residents a demo,” Crowe said. “Our first one is on February 23. And, to really utilize the space, we created a recipe station in the store, using a computer that Dell had given us, cookbooks and recipes in a tin.”
Goodr Grocery Store is open Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. You can find out more information about the store or other Goodr initiatives here.
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