Marc Stachiw introduced Lourdes Juan, founder of Fresh Routes Inc., a social enterprise that is creating innovative ways of providing healthy and affordable food to Canadians in need. Its mobile grocery stores bring healthy, fresh, and affordable food into neighbourhoods facing barriers, thereby providing choice, allowing its users to maintain their dignity, and building community. The mission of Fresh Routes Inc. is to ensure that everyone has access to affordable, nutritious food and is informed to make healthy decisions to live a healthy life.

 

Fresh Routes has refurbished a Calgary Transit bus and returned it to the streets as a mobile grocery store. It purchases produce locally and sells it at a 40 to 60 percent markdown, so communities with limited access to grocery stores or low incomes can eat well. The mobile grocery store opened its doors for the first time on October 7 and has served communities in northeast Calgary and the Stoney-Nakoda First Nation.

 

The mobile grocery store aims to serve people who live in “food deserts,” which are neighbourhoods with limited availability of nutritious, affordable food. Some of these neighbourhoods have large seniors populations with mobility issues. To get to a grocery store can be "challenging,” said Juan.

 

Operating pop-up markets since July 2018 through the Leftovers Foundation, our speaker realized that a retrofitted city bus was the best way to bring nutritional choices to those facing transportation or economic barriers. She noted that the idea is not original as Halifax and St. Louis, MO, have similar programs.

 

Fresh Routes worked with a Toronto-based design firm to create the mobile grocery store, which includes a walk-in refrigerator at the back of the bus. Fittingly, the slogan on the side of the bus reads, “Good food stops for you.”