How to Buy Groceries in New York City
The case for going big on (and going beyond) public grocery stores
Errol Schweizer outlines the existing network of public programs, wholesale markets, and supply chains that feed New Yorkers, and proposes five policies that can increase access to high-quality and affordable food for all.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept into office on a bold affordability agenda. Now, just weeks into his term, his administration is already advancing major reforms around housing, childcare, worker protections and small business permitting. However, with respect to the campaign promise to open publicly-owned grocery stores—a pledge that elicited huge public support—fewer details have emerged.
As the program takes shape, the Mamdani administration should treat public grocery stores as one piece of a broader commitment to the right to good food. And it should pursue that commitment at the scale necessary for its success.
Slack in the Food Market
The need for action on food costs is clear. Food prices in New York City have increased by over 30 percent since 2019, and by 56.2 percent since 2012. As a result, over 1.5 million, or 17.5 percent of New Yorkers, are food insecure, including nearly 25 percent of residents in the Bronx. More than 40 percent of families can’t afford their weekly groceries, and only 10 percent of neighborhoods meet the city’s goal of containing thirty thousand square feet of full-service grocery per ten thousand residents. New York City’s existing supermarket sector has not been able to solve for affordability or access.
It’s not just a New York problem. Food prices are higher everywhere. Grocery prices are up 35 percent since 2019 and nearly 5 percent over the past year. The top selling categories, such as eggs, soft drinks, beef, and chocolate, have increased an average over 60 percent since 2019.
Meanwhile, massive consolidation in the grocery industry has enabled the largest players—nationally distributed packaged food brands and mass market retailers—to raise consumer prices above the rate of inflation, pocketing billions in profits for shareholders. Unsealed documents from a recent FTC-PepsiCo lawsuit illustrate the inside deals that the snack and beverage giant cut with Walmart, while raising prices for other retailers. This kind of price manipulation and collusion is common in the grocery industry, from Instacart’s dynamic pricing, to Agri Stats and other systemic meat price fixing, to price coordination by the “tater tot cartel.” In short, the highly consolidated, private grocery industry has betrayed the promise of industrially-produced food: to keep good food cheap, convenient, and abundant. Now is the time for NYC to pick up the slack.
It’s worth noting that as bold as Mamdani’s promise of publicly-owned groceries sounds, it wouldn’t be starting from scratch. Over 22 percent of New York City, or 1.8 million residents, receive SNAP benefits. Recipients of the benefits spend $5 billion annually and account for over 20 percent of total grocery sales in New York City. Further, New York City has long been a leader in municipal food policy efforts. Policies and agency efforts have aimed at keeping pace with the challenges of the post-pandemic economy, including values-based purchasing standards for public institutions, a robust food and climate strategy, and many city-wide food access programs, including farmers markets, limited supermarket subsidies to sell fresh foods in underserved areas, food pantries, partially subsidized public market stalls, mobile food carts offering fresh produce, a program that provides NYC SNAP participants with free fresh produce at certain supermarkets, and monthly credits to purchase SNAP-eligible groceries for delivery or pickup. A network of public grocery stores is a continuation of—not a break from—existing city policy.
However, the details of implementation will be critical. The plan presented during the campaign called for an initial pilot of five stores with a $65 million budget that would sell food at wholesale prices. There’s reason to believe that officials are now considering outsourcing to private operators, to enable faster scale up and to enable leveraging existing wholesale contracts.
Both of these elements come with risks. The use of private operators opens the door to the inside income streams common in retail, such as invoice deductions, freight charges, or wholesaler markups on discounts that do not pass through to consumer price savings. Further, private operators would need special oversight to ensure that they provide high-paying, unionized jobs.
Even more risky is starting with a five-site pilot. This might seem counter-intuitive—isn’t it good to start small and then build the program out based on early success? While that might be true in certain instances, in the case of a public grocery program, scale is crucial.
Buying Big
Though Mamdani has promised that these stores will sell at wholesale prices, this alone is insufficient to ensure affordability, as wholesale prices are not fixed. They vary wildly in relation to the purchasing power of operators and a five-store pilot is unlikely to achieve the purchasing power necessary to make a real dent in food access. Consider that the proposed pilot would allocate a $60 million first year investment across five stores ($10 million estimated for start-up costs, and $50 million for operating costs). This allocation translates to $192,000 in weekly revenue per store, on the lower end of neighborhood supermarket sales, below the average Key Food or Gristedes, and well below the average Food Bazaar, which have dozens of locations in the city. Public grocery locations would, therefore, lack the buying power necessary to negotiate competitive wholesale prices and other favorable terms (such as on wholesale markups or fill rate requirements), resulting in a poor return on investment. The $50 million annual operating expenditure would likely yield no more than $15–20 million in consumer savings, or about 10 to 15 percent consumer savings, a far cry from the promised 30 to 40 percent reduction.
Fortunately, Community Food Advocates, a New York based NGO, has been working on issues related to food access for several years and has identified how to increase supermarket access in NYC, including financing, building operator capacity, leveraging city assets, supporting alternative ownership models such as cooperatives, and empowering community leadership. In 2025, as a response to both the Mamdani campaign and critics of the public grocery idea, CFA convened an informal coalition of cooperatives, farmers, scholars and industry experts, and outlined a scaled-up, city-owned supermarket network of twenty stores, alongside a cooperative food and supply chain infrastructure.
The north star for such an enterprise is the US military commissary system (DeCA), which uses public funds to feed over a million service members daily, saving them billions of dollars every year by fully subsidizing retail markups and negotiating rock-bottom wholesale costs. DeCA ranked #27 on the dunnhumby retailer preference index for 2025, keeping pace with the private sector.
The CFA proposal’s numbers on public grocery ownership, based on a joint analysis by myself and Raj Patel originally published in Civil Eats, posits that a city-owned grocery sector focused on affordability would need more than five stores to approach DeCA-like viability. Such a scaled-up network of twenty stores would require $445 million in Year 1 ($60 million startup plus $385 million in annual operations) but would deliver $400 million in annual consumer savings—$1.04 saved for every dollar invested—while creating 800–1,000 living-wage jobs. To achieve lower wholesale markups and stronger negotiation leverage from suppliers, cheaper freight and handling costs, and better delivery schedules, this larger network would feature urban warehouse style stores that sell a slimmer assortment of approximately 1,000–1,500 high-volume items. This model would enable significant cost reductions through economies of scale, based on the practices that successful, large-scale retailers use every day to lower in-bound costs. With the city covering the store operating costs as well, customers would see 30 to 40 percent retail price savings relative to market prices.
Another element of CFA’s plan that the Mamdani administration should adopt involves investing in cooperative ownership infrastructure as a way to build community-controlled food businesses. The total investment for cooperative expansion would be $128 million in Year 1 to cover startup costs, declining to $13 million annually in Years 2–3 and just $6 million ongoing from Year 4 forward. New York City has long had a burgeoning cooperative food economy, including retailer-owned and wholesale cooperatives such as Key Food, Wakefern, and Hunts Point Market; worker-owned cooperatives such as Brooklyn Packers; and consumer-owned cooperatives such as Park Slope Food Co-op. Cooperatives demonstrate higher survival rates than conventional businesses (60 to 70 percent at five years versus 40 to 50 percent) and redistribute revenue and profits back to their communities, while developing local economies and supply chains. Cooperatives would enable more local residents to have a direct say, and an ownership stake, in the food industry, a vital strategy to avoid both corporate profiteering and bureaucratic negligence.
Beyond the Stores
These two programs—a twenty-store supermarket network and substantial investment in food cooperatives—would require approximately $573 million in Year 1, with ongoing costs declining to roughly $391 million annually, less than 0.5 percent of NYC’s budget. But if the Mamdani administration is serious about allaying food insecurity and safeguarding people’s right to good food, they will need to do more than merely open and support public grocers. Instead, the city needs a full suite of policies to address the different levels of affordability in the food system: retail, supply chain, pricing, and delivery. Here are five additional policies the Mamdani administration should adopt to ensure that New Yorkers have access to good, cheap food.
First, NYC officials should regulate local wholesale and retail price dynamics. Public grocery stores will still be dependent on private sector supply chains and their wild, wild west of price setting. Keeping track of market pricing on core consumable products such as milk, eggs, bread, meat, cheese, fruits, and vegetables, investigating excessive markups from wholesalers and retailers, and banning price discrimination and algorithmic price manipulation should all be high on the radar to solve for affordability.
Second, the city should expand direct payments to consumers that reduce their overall food expenditures, especially as new SNAP cuts take effect. Putting a billion dollars, or less than 1 percent of the city budget, into consumer payments could have a substantial impact, especially for city residents that are asset limited, income constrained and employed (ALICE) but are above the federal poverty level.
Third, the city can subsidize prices at retailers willing to fully pass through discounts to consumers by using syndicated data to audit sales movement and rebate retailers per unit sold. This would be a public sector approach to how grocers manage promotional funds from suppliers. If NYC were to subsidize half the retail markups at all NYC indie supermarkets, that would result in around $2 billion a year in consumer savings. That is less than 2 percent of the city’s annual budget.
How could this work in practice? Here’s a brief gameplan to consider, based on typical retail operations. City officials would start with price surveys on core consumables by borough and zip code. They would then set price ceilings at 50 percent of local market retail price (NTE or “not to exceed” pricing is a common promotional strategy). Participating retailers would be required to adhere to price ceilings, and city officials would use syndicated data to audit unit movement by store weekly and monthly. The city would then rebate participating retailers monthly, to cover the difference between the regular retail price and the price ceiling, based on the number of units sold at the store. This mirrors the promotional scan back rebate process that grocers typically use. The main downside to this approach is that it requires a large administrative and auditing team, as there is a potential risk for misappropriations. The upside is that it would have a huge impact on affordability, while also taking pressure off of neighborhood grocers.
Fourth, the administration should look into contracting for private label consumables from co-manufacturers. These would be popular, shelf-stable packaged products (such as ready to eat meals, soups and vegetables, baked goods and snacks, beverages, nutrition bars, etc.) that could be stored for emergency food assistance, distributed through publicly owned stores, sold to supermarkets, or allocated to public feeding programs in schools, hospitals, and food pantries. The city could leverage collective scale to justify the labor, line time, food safety, and supply chain requirements of co-manufacturers, without the wholesale and retail markups. This “public label” approach would disrupt the supply and pricing dynamics of the most commonly sold pantry items.
Finally, the city should provide its own app-based delivery to solve the “last mile problem” of food insecurity, but without the exploitation common to the apps. The “last mile” is the highest cost and most complex aspect of food delivery, rarely a profit center for businesses, and typically rife with exploitation and wage theft. The Mamdani administration is taking good steps to regulate last mile delivery apps and protect delivery workers, but consumers must still pay exorbitant fees for these services. The city already operates shuttle services that take elderly and disabled people places, such as Access-A-Ride. Would it be a huge stretch to also use such infrastructure to bring food to people who need it? If Uber could figure this out with their rideshare services, then why not the city?
The Mamdani victory drove home two salient facts: the crisis of affordability is real, and voters want solutions—now. The private sector, after years of record profits, price inflation, and deregulation, has failed to ensure that good food is cheap, abundant, and convenient. The Mamdani administration can step into the breach by leveraging regulatory powers, collective scale, and public infrastructure to ensure good food for all.
Errol Schweizer has worked in the food industry for more than thirty years, including serving as head of grocery at Whole Foods from 2009 to 2016. He is a panelist with the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and the publisher of an industry newsletter called The Checkout Grocery Update.