It has become an article of faith among some policy makers and advocates, including Michelle Obama, that poor urban neighborhoods are food deserts, bereft of fresh fruits and vegetables. But two new studies have found something unexpected. Such neighborhoods not only have more fast food restaurants and convenience stores than more affluent ones, but more grocery stores, supermarkets and full-service restaurants, too. And there is no relationship between the type of food being sold in a neighborhood and obesity among its children and adolescents.

The hottest trend in the grocery business might just be setting up shop in food deserts. Since 2010, when Rahm Emanuel adopted the issue during his mayoral campaign, big retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Walgreen Co. have made well-publicized commitments to build stores in underserved neighborhoods in Chicago and other urban centers.

While Mississippi is ripe with green scenery, the Partnership for a Healthy Mississippi says a huge slice of the Mississippi Delta has too few grocery stores. This is also the case in some urban areas of Mississippi experts say this limits access to healthy foods.

This toolkit from ChangeLab Solutions provides a range of tools and strategies for advocates to identify and work with prospective WIC vendors, and to help these retailers upgrade their offerings in accordance with the new, healthier WIC food packages.

ChangeLab Solutions developed a Model Licensing Ordinance for Healthy Food Retailers, along with an accompanying guide that describes how the ordinance works and provides tips on how to implement it successfully in your community. The ordinance changes business licensing policies to require all food stores (not including restaurants) to carry a minimum selection of healthy food and meet other basic operating standards. In short, it sets a "healthy baseline" to improve food quality and accessibility at food stores across an entire community.

A profile on Liberty Heights ShopRite located in the West Baltimore neighborhood of Howard Park. The supermarket is a joint venture by two seasoned ShopRite operators, Jeff Brown and the Klein family. The partnership will combine the Klein family’s 90 year background of owning and operating stores in suburban Maryland and Jeff Brown’s experience in running urban-based stores in the Philadelphia region. The project also stands as an example of a successful partnership involving Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC), the Howard Park Civic Association, Calvin Rodwell Elementary School’s Child First Afterschool Program, Klein Family Markets, UpLift Solutions, Opportunity Finance Network (OFN), City First Bank, JPMorgan Chase and The Reinvestment Fund (TRF).

The Healthy Food Access Fund is a lending program that provides capital financing for full-service grocery businesses or developers with a grocery tenant. It was created to help grocers succeed in underserved markets and is designed with those grocers' needs in mind.

The Reinvestment Funds’s (TRF) New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) program funds community and economic development projects in distressed communities by leveraging private-sector equity and loan capital investment into community development projects to stimulate economic growth and create jobs in the areas that most need it. TRF’s allocations have provided a combination of debt and equity to three project types, each in highly distressed areas in the mid-Atlantic: charter schools, full service supermarkets, and other commercial and mixed-use developments. This fact sheet highlights some examples of their food access projects:

Hunts Point Produce Market, located in the South Hunts Bronx, receives premium fruits and vegetables daily from 49 states and 55 countries, and provides 60 percent of New York City's produce. Every day a fleet of trucks delivers the market's fresh food throughout the five boroughs, yet only a miniscule amount gets distributed to the South Bronx, a community underserved by traditional supermarkets and green grocers. This article discusses several city programs that are improving healthy food access in areas like the South Bronx and suggests improvements for greater impactful change.

Actor and humanitarian Wendell Pierce talks about his new fresh and wholesome grocery store named Sterling Farms in a radio interview with blackamericaweb.com. Located in his hometown of New Orleans, Pierce is hoping to revitalize the local economy and bring the community together.