Lowcountry Street Grocery holds that all people should be afforded the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—and produce. For the past decade, this do-good operation has cooked up creative ways to put fruits and veggies on every community member’s plate regardless of income. Many have been introduced to Nell, the school bus-turned-mobile farmers market that’s employed “Robin Hood economics” to subsidize affordable produce in food deserts since 2017. But they may not be familiar with the group’s other efforts: Community Supported Grocery (CSG) and Grocery Rx. Under the Lowcountry Street Grocery (LSG) canopy, these branches cooperate to yield a more equitable, convenient, and scalable local food economy. “We think about ways to literally get produce to the people,” says founder/CEO Lindsey Barrow Jr.
If Nell is the shiny face of LSG, then its backbone is the Community Supported Grocery, which partners with regional growers and producers to deliver goods directly to members. CSG began as a way to clear extra produce from the mobile market and provide a secondary revenue stream. Barrow formed a community-supported agriculture combo in 2018, with inventory ranging from entire farm crops to a few grapefruit bushels from a backyard grower. Soon, bundles were landing on some 100 porches, with another 200 waiting hungry to join.
Then one morning, as Barrow and Olivia Myers, his business partner and wife, sat in their 300-square-foot office lined with secondhand refrigerators, one of their farmers began rolling in hand truck after hand truck of eggs—36 cases in all—tearfully explaining that he’d lost his accounts when the pandemic closed restaurants. The team would hear that story repeated by every farmer, baker, and maker with whom they partnered. So, CSG bought every good presented to them, hacked a shipping container for cold storage, borrowed a produce truck, employed local producers and farmers market friends, and arranged home deliveries. “Overnight, we began operating for 1,500 people,” says Barrow…