As a child growing up in a food desert on the South Side of Chicago, Stacey Minor used to travel with her mom to a Homewood grocery store where they shopped for fruits, vegetables and other groceries.
Today, Minor runs Sweet Potato Patch. It’s a Chicago-based business she founded that delivers healthy food, sourced from minority farmers, to residents in urban food deserts. She is seeking to open an industrial kitchen and “culturally sensitive” market on a roughly 13-acre site in Lynwood. The kitchen and market would encompass 16,000 square feet of space each, she said.
The development, planned on the southeast corner of Glenwood-Lansing Road and Torrence Avenue, would house the company’s corporate office space and potentially lease space to other businesses. The market would be the flagship store for the company, said Minor.
“We are also looking at having a promenade for entrepreneurial pop ups in this space and quite possibly a community health organization,” Minor said.
A vote on zoning approval is expected in December, said Lynwood Mayor Jada Curry, and she welcomes the project. It is planned in phases, starting with the kitchen and then the market, said Minor. If approved by the village board, Minor expects more than 100 people, including corporate staff and individuals hired from the community, will work at the site once the development is completed.
The market will not be “run of the mill” with a lot of canned goods and processed foods, she shared.
“We’re being really intentional about the market that we put in the community,” said Minor. “Our goal is to increase access to healthy foods by focusing more on vegetables, meat, homemade bread, teaching people to cook.”
Customers also will be able to purchase the company’s low salt and no salt prepared heat and serve meals, she said.
Unlike other big box grocery stores, Sweet Potato Patch is “going to focus on the whole of the community,” she said. “That means we’re really creating a store that’s cultural sensitive for all walks of life. So, you won’t have just one aisle of Asian goods or one aisle of Mexican goods.”
Culturally sensitive products will be intertwined throughout the store, which will create a unique market experience, she explained.
Sweet Potato Patch has hundreds of customers throughout metropolitan Chicago, including the south suburbs. The company also delivers meals through managed care organizations to Medicare and Medicaid patients, Minor said.
Curry said the project is a huge win for Lynwood.
“You have this entrepreneur who is extremely passionate about healthy eating, who has turned her business into something really special and unique,” Curry said. “For her to choose Lynwood as the home base for their corporate location is a testament to what people are seeing in Lynwood as the potential of our village.”
She praised Minor’s efforts to help address food deserts like Lynwood and said the market will be a first for the village.
“You have so many young people facing health issues, struggling with diabetes and other medical issues,” said Curry. “That can change by incorporating a healthy diet. She really has taken the time to understand the needs.”
Sweet Potato Patch’s website states it uses smart technology and GPS tracked crowdsourced delivery technology to deliver food to customers. It helps address one of the social determinants of health — having consistent access to healthy foods, said Minor.
She came up with the idea after observing that food delivery businesses like Peapod were largely absent from urban desert communities, she said.
She decided to create a business model like Uber Eats or Peapod but that targeted food deserts and also is able to source fresh produce from African American, Latino and Indigenous farmers across the country “to create a whole ecosystem” and deliver healthy foods with a cultural twist, she said.
“This is missing in communities across the United States,” she said.
“There are a lot of people that just don’t have access to transportation, to cars and so we decided if we deliver to them, then we can ensure equal and easier access to the foods that everybody else has access to.”
In doing so, she is providing a market for minority farmers who were unable to get their healthy produce, including leafy greens, black-eyed peas and red and green bell peppers, into big box stores and often had to discard tons of their products, she said.
Among Sweet Potato Patch’s heat and serve food offerings are buffalo chicken tacos with skillet Mexican corn, turkey lasagna, and grilled chicken with cranberry sweet potato, wild rice pilaf and green beans.
Minor, a graduate of Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, obtained a bachelor of applied science degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her background includes having worked three years in the 1990s as a senior research biologist at Monsanto, where she said she was recruited as one of the first African American female scientists in plant biotechnology. At Monsanto, she first began to form relationships with African American farmers, she said.
She said the Sweet Potato Patch Lynwood development will “help us to scale and serve more people. We see this market as a way to touch, move and inspire people in Lynwood and in the surrounding area that don’t really have a market like this.”
She is hopeful, if approved, the kitchen will open in the first quarter of next year, to be followed by the market.
Francine Knowles is a freelance columnist for the Daily Southtown.
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