City Greens Market

Who We Are

City Greens Market is a nonprofit grocery store that provides access to quality, fresh, local food for our neighbors in The Grove and St. Louis City. We meet our customers' cultural and nutrition needs while creating opportunities to make values-aligned choices. 

We buy fresh, quality food from more than 109 local farmers, work with more than 80 local businesses, and then sell food from all of them AT COST to our members. Memberships are sliding scale based upon household income. 

Through our Double Up Food Bucks program, families using food stamps can get all fresh produce for half off and still support local farmers and Black owned businesses.

We learn with and from our community by hosting monthly Meet Your Farmer events, offering nutrition and gardening workshops, demonstrating cooking and food preservation techniques, and welcoming our community members to come hang out on our patio.

Our customers value us for our low prices, but also care about how their food choices affect the systems they live in, including their neighborhood, the environment, and the local economy. They want access to quality, affordable food that aligns with their values. And they want to support their communities. Whether that’s walking to their neighborhood grocery store, supporting food access, volunteering to get to know their neighbors, supporting local sustainable farmers, or learning from and with their community. City Greens offers the space for everyone to affordably meet their food needs while also contributing to these overlapping values.

Our Impact

City Greens is a market by the people for the people:

• Neighborhood women experiencing the negative effects of food insecurity created the City Greens program in 2009. We've been selling local, fresh, sustainably-grown food at cost to our neighbors ever since.
• In the last year, 1,000+ neighbors regularly ate food from City Greens Market that was grown by local farmers or processed by local businesses.
• Sliding scale membership means that 60% of memberships are subsidized by other members: everyone gives what they can so that all can get what they need.

We also offer support to new food businesses and farmers, working with them as they figure out the kinks in their operations, and helping them access new markets. We’ve supported dozens of local businesses as they were up-and-coming, and want to increase that number by 30% in the next year. We collaborate with dozens of local farmers, businesses, and nonprofits to increase food security, support local food systems, and work toward food sovereignty.

We use the lessons we’ve learned and the relationships we’ve built over the years to support other community food markets, including United People Market, Be Well Café and Market in Hyde Park, and A Red Circle’s work to open the People's Harvest community grocery store in Ferguson. We regularly introduce our vendors and these organizations to each other so that everyone benefits.

For 15 years, City Greens Market has made fresh food more affordable for everyone while working toward our founding Mamas' revolutionary vision: economic justice and a community-powered food system.