After 14 years of organizing, Detroit's first Black-led, community-owned grocery store opened at Woodward and Euclid on May 1, 2024. The Detroit People's Food Co-op started welcoming shoppers that morning. By opening day, more than 2,500 member-owners had signed up at $200 apiece. Diane Hoye, a metro Detroit resident in the line outside, said she'd been waiting three years for the doors to open. She wasn't alone.
Eight months in, the store had cleared $3 million in sales and grown past 4,000 owners.
The co-op is one piece of the $22 million Detroit Food Commons, a 30,000-square-foot building that also includes a banquet hall with capacity for around 350, four shared commercial kitchens, and office space upstairs. The Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network and Develop Detroit drove the project. The grand opening of the broader Food Commons followed on May 18.
Malik Yakini, executive director of DBCFSN, has been the project's public face for most of those 14 years. He has framed the project as a model of a non-extractive food economy, particularly in Detroit's Black community. Lanay Gilbert-Williams chairs the co-op board. Akil Talley runs day-to-day operations as general manager.
The math the co-op is up against is straightforward and ugly. Detroiters spend an estimated $300 to $500 million on groceries in the suburbs each year. The city has roughly 64 grocery stores. Almost none are Black-owned. Cass Corridor Food Co-op, the last cooperatively-owned grocery in the city, closed in the early 2000s. By United Way's ALICE measure, roughly three in four Detroiters may not have regular access to healthy food.
Inside, the format is what you'd expect from a well-run co-op. Fresh produce sourced from local Black-run urban farms, including DTown, Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, and the Green Boots Project. A hot food bar that has, by most accounts, become the actual draw. Stocked goods from over 40 local vendors. The store keeps a 50/50 split between organic and conventional, the model Gilbert-Williams describes as putting familiar packaged foods on the same shelf as items most Detroiters won't have seen at a chain grocery.
There is, predictably, a critique that prices run high. National co-op operators describe this as a structural problem rather than a Detroit one. The 2021 Rockefeller report on the true cost of food (counting environmental and social externalities) puts it at roughly three times what most Americans pay at the register.
The co-op hosts free meals, a regular Monday chess night, and a seven-day Kwanzaa program. Talley has hinted at a second location on the west side, in five to seven years.
Open daily from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
8324 Woodward Avenue, North End.
