“It used to be a saying that a town needed a bank, a post office, and a grocery store to survive. And if you didn’t have any one of those things, the town would die,” stated Brian Horak, manager of Post-60 Market, when sharing how his cooperatively owned grocery store came to be.

Post-60 Market’s story starts in 2018, after the small town of Emerson, Nebraska, lost its only grocery store, leaving residents without a convenient source of fresh food. Staring down the potential decline of their community, residents rallied together to raise funds to convert a former American Legion building into a cooperatively owned grocery store. It now serves three rural counties as the only grocery store in a 25-mile radius. The saga of Emerson’s struggle to improve food access is just one of many playing out in towns across the country, reflecting a broader trend in the grocery industry where corporations continue to consolidate and attain outsized portions of market share, squeezing out competition and posing a massive threat to food access in vulnerable areas.

Over the past two decades, corporations have steadily consolidated the grocery industry, resulting in a highly concentrated market. In 2000, four parent companies controlled 42.5% of the total market share, while over half of the money spent in the grocery industry was divided among smaller, more regional food retail operations. By 2023, that concentration had risen sharply, with 67% of the market held by just four top parent companies. Of particular interest is Walmart’s market share, which grew 1035% between 2000 and 2023 and has dominated the grocery industry with the highest single-company market share.

The more concentrated a market, the higher the barriers to entry, and the harder it is to compete. The harm this poses to competition has tangible consequences. Workers suffer deteriorated working conditions due to the lack of accountability and alternative employment options. Corporations prioritizing their bottom line above all else leave consumers subject to price gouging, divestment of grocery options in their neighborhoods, and poor food access. Farmers who face challenges breaking into such a restricted market are robbed of opportunities to feed their communities and generate income for their operations.

Despite this rampant concentration, antitrust enforcement in the grocery industry over the last twenty years has been negligible. Laws like the Robinson-Patman Act, which is supposed to prevent price discrimination, go underutilized; the FTC has not brought a case under this law since 2000. Revitalizing these antitrust laws is crucial to mitigating grocery’s ongoing market concentration. Without a reliable analysis of market consolidation’s pervasiveness and consequences across the country, corporations can continue evading accountability and further concentrate the grocery industry.

Enter The Grocery Gap Atlas. In partnership with the Open Spatial Lab at the University of Chicago’s Data Science Institute, RAFI developed the Grocery Gap Atlas to better illuminate the structural factors that contribute to food insecurity across the U.S., experienced at disproportionately high rates in rural and non-white communities. This geospatial analysis tool is designed to visualize corporate concentration in the grocery industry, how it affects food access, and which consumers are most impacted.

Mapping the Grocery Gap

The Grocery Gap Atlas measures the concentration of retail grocery markets at national, state, county, and census tract levels — the closer a market is to a monopoly, the higher the market’s concentration and the lower its competition. Additionally, the Atlas measures how adequately grocers provide food access, which is determined by analyzing travel distances to grocery stores and comparing the food demand of a given geography to the supply available, as reflected by grocery sales data. Market concentration and food access quality are then mapped alongside each other to show how the two are correlated. Areas in dark blue are both highly concentrated and have limited food access, according to data from 2020. The Grocery Gap Atlas found that poor food access is somewhat more likely in areas with high market concentration and that this is most pervasive in rural areas, particularly impacting the rural West, the Mississippi Delta, and Appalachia.

When corporations dominate an area, these geographies are susceptible to underinvestment in their food access needs. When food access declines, so does the health of entire communities. Workers lose jobs at stores that are closed. Competitors are prevented from filling the gaps in food access. Mid-scale farmers who live in these predominantly rural areas are cut off from various market opportunities and are forced to accept unfair contracts that do not fully account for the cost of their labor and operations — contracts that are entirely inaccessible to small-scale farmers. The Grocery Gap Atlas seeks to produce substantial data analysis that can more reliably inform policy decisions addressing concentration in the grocery industry, educate the public about how concentration impacts food access in their communities, and identify potential solutions.

A Future for Small Groceries

“What’s for supper tonight?” Horak endeavors to answer this question as he considers creative solutions to meet the needs of Emerson residents. A pragmatist, he recognizes how thin his margins are when competing with the buying power of monoliths like Hy-Vee and Walmart. Though he sources 99% of the store’s products from Associated Wholesale Grocers (AWG), he struggles to get distributors to stock a small store in such an isolated area.

Even with state-level initiatives meant to help establish new grocery businesses, expansions of investor bases, and countless grant applications, the financial limitations of smaller grocery stores competing in a land of corporate giants pose enormous challenges to the resurgence of rural grocery. Corporations exploit their outsized market power by extracting discounts from grocery suppliers, and small grocery stores pay the price for this parasitic relationship. Small groceries often end up paying even more for their stock as suppliers try to recoup the difference. In order to thrive long-term, food retail operations like Post-60 require federal-level policy designed to curtail market concentration, expand grant qualifications to include more creative grocery solutions, and incentivize a more regionally robust food system that doesn’t rely on corporate whims. While some solutions, like the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, have been proposed and implemented, small-scale food retail will need comprehensive support to remain viable long-term.

In the meantime, Horak keeps dreaming bigger. He envisions a Post-60 that has the capacity one day to serve surrounding towns that also lost grocery stores and struggle under conditions that make food access so abysmal. To Horak, Post-60’s highly local and collaborative structure gives him an edge over corporations that are only concerned with their bottom line.

“You always want to make money. But our motivation is to be a service to the community,” he shares. “So, as long as we pay our bills and put a little money in the bank, we’re okay. The rest is just to help the town succeed.”

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Melanie Canales is the Challenging Corporate Power Project Manager at RAFI. Her years of experience in narrative development and working on farms have yielded a fierce commitment to cultivating a just and equitable food system. Her focuses include antitrust legislation, just agricultural transition, and resilient regional markets and food systems.