Five years ago, Rochester City Council took action to address a food access crisis.
Nearly one in five city residents are “food insecure,” meaning they have uncertain access to adequate food. That is nearly double the number for the Monroe County suburbs. The rates for Black and Hispanic people in the city are higher, at 27% and 29%, respectively. All those figures rose sharply after the pandemic.
The solution was to create the Rochester Food Policy Council (FPC) as a means of improving healthy food access for city residents. It was based in large part on recommendations included in Rochester 2034, the city’s long-term planning document.
“I think there’s a — pun intended — big appetite for this,” Mike Bulger of Common Ground Health said at the time.
More than 300 communities across the country have formed food policy councils, including Buffalo, Syracuse, Ithaca, Cortland and Binghamton. They are meant to provide coordination to a sprawling topic that touches on public health, economic development, land use policy, education and urban agriculture, among other things.
That confluence of factors is on display at Beautifully Nourished, a juice bar that opened on State Street earlier this year. It is owned by JaCorri Smith, a first-time entrepreneur who described her own journey toward healthy living.
Between her work in youth advising and cosmetics and her role in raising three children, she said, there was little time left to consider her own health.
“I’d get home and just be depleted, I wouldn’t have eaten all day or hydrated all day,” she said. “I had to have a conversation with myself: ‘You can’t keep going like this.’”
The solution she hit on was juicing — first at home, then selling them on a small scale. She went through a city-sponsored entrepreneurship training program called Prepare to Prosper and opened her business in May.
“You’ve got to be good to your body,” Smith said, “so your body can be good to you.”
Like an overstuffed juicer, the Rochester FPC has had to find cohesion among a bevy of stakeholders and interests. The council represents a partnership between the city, Foodlink and a sub-coalition of community health organizations; it is governed by a citizens’ council; and it features formal and informal working groups dedicated to different aspects of the overall vision.
Josie McClary, one of the council members, said the FPC should serve as a bridge connecting those various stakeholders. At the same time, she acknowledged that, early on, coordination emerged as a sticking point.
“Communication has been a challenge at times, just reconciling people’s different perspectives, passions, skills, constituencies,” she said.
The Rochester FPC has three major areas of focus. The first is affecting municipal plans and policies. It cites as a victory the 2024 passage of a Children’s Indoor Bill of Rights, which enshrines a right to nutrition education and healthy meals and snacks at R-Centers. It is also pushing Gov. Kathy Hochul to sign state legislation that would allow “values-based food procurement,” meaning schools, hospitals, prisons and other public institutions would be allowed to consider a broader range of community impacts when awarding food service bids.
A second area of focus is youth and food. The FPC is trying to improve coordination with the Rochester City School District on topics like school lunches, summer meals and school gardens.
The third area of focus is urban agriculture and community gardens. The FPC is seeking language in the city’s zoning code revision to allow for larger greenhouses on vacant lots. It also wants the city to issue gardening permits that are good for at least five years rather than just one.
For many Rochester residents, the most pressing food-related concern has to do with the availability of healthy groceries — if not at a full-service grocery store, then at a corner store, mobile market or through some other means. The lack of progress on that front over the last five years illustrates the broader challenges facing the Rochester FPC and the fight for food access.
Those challenges, as well as the resources at hand, are perhaps most evident in the Beechwood neighborhood.
Beechwood has some of the best-developed community gardening infrastructure in the city. The Rochester Public Market is just to the west, while the city’s only Wegmans location, on East Avenue, is just southeast. The non-profit Connected Communities and the Beechwood Neighborhood Coalition provide a powerful nexus for social and political organizing.
Nonetheless, a February 2026 report by Connected Communities described Beechwood as a food swamp (where there is a surplus of high-calorie, ultra-processed food available). “Healthy food was widely described as unaffordable and difficult to access due to limited public transportation options,” the report concluded. A proposed new food store on Webster Avenue was deemed economically unfeasible.
To make matters worse, the Save-A-Lot grocery store in North Goodman Plaza closed in January 2026 after the national chain concluded it was unprofitable.
“Despite being a larger store, the Save-A-Lot was still unable to remain in business, which further speaks to the small profit margins of many traditional grocers,” the Connected Communities report concluded. “The closure of the Save-A-Lot also signals to the market that a grocery store catering to low-income customers in this location is not likely to yield significant profit for the operator.”
The North Goodman Save-A-Lot was one of more than 100 locations to close nationwide this year. Other discount grocers have taken similar measures, though a new Family Dollar opened in 2024 on Thurston Road, replacing a Walgreens store that closed suddenly.
Such decisions are made in company boardrooms, not communities. They do not take into account purely local concerns about healthy food access or repairing historical disinvestment. A major part of FPC’s job is to find alternatives to that relentlessly profit-driven model. A Community Food System Plan released earlier this year called for better alignment with regional agriculture and exploring financial incentives for more healthy food retail in the city, among other things.
That charge to look at the food system holistically has been illuminated over the last five years, but also made it difficult to gain traction.
Corner stores and urban agriculture are “great stop-gap measures,” said Paul Whitehouse, a council member and Beechwood resident who is active in community gardening. “But they’re not the answer. So we need to be working cooperatively toward that answer.” rocfoodpolicy.org
Justin Murphy is a freelance journalist and author of the book “Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger: School Segregation in Rochester, New York.” Find him online at justinmurphywriter.com.
