For Lisa Freeman, every step toward opening the Freeman Family Farm Store has been a leap of faith, and not all landings have been smooth.
Since she came to Manchester in 2009, she’s learned how to cultivate everything from kale and potatoes to permaculture gardens and greenhouses. Now with the opening of her new store, she faces another uphill battle: the free marketplace.
That’s because Freeman isn’t doing things the way most small, corner grocery stores do. For one, she’s not selling sugary snacks, smokes, energy drinks or lottery tickets, which are staples that small corner stores tend to rely on to drive business. But she’s also not using price tags.
Instead she's asking customers to choose a price they believe is fair. She’s hoping this way, customers will help manage the razor-thin margins small grocery stores face.
With the exception of the meat, “whatever you're buying, you decide how much you want to pay for it,” Freeman explained. “So people who might have a little extra, give us extra. People who might not have enough, we accept that because someone has given us extra.”
Community Hurdles
Freeman's pay-what's-fair model has increasingly captured researchers' attention in the past decade. Freeman said it’s an experiment she’s trying in an effort to make quality food accessible to local underserved populations in Manchester, as well as other economically challenged neighborhoods throughout Pittsburgh.
Her 860-square-foot shop improves access to fresh food in her neighborhood. The median income and home price in Manchester is increasing as more affluent people are moving in, but food access remains a challenge for some, and the neighborhood is considered a food desert. There’s some debate in food systems circles about the idea and definition, but the USDA defines a food desert as “a low-income [census] tract with at least 500 people, or 33 percent of the population, living more than 1 mile (urban areas) or more than 10 miles (rural areas) from the nearest supermarket, supercenter, or large grocery store.”
And while small corner grocery stores used to be common, Bradley Wilson, who directs the Center for Resilient Communities at West Virginia University, explains that during the past 50-70 years, grocery models have dramatically changed. Smaller groceries have given way to big box stores as Americans have traded backyard gardens, neighborhood stores and nutritional quality for prices and convenience of large retail stores.
“When those retailers kind of came in,” Wilson explains, “it made it much, much, much more difficult for the smaller mom-and-pop, bodega grocery store not just to compete on price, but to even access those goods, because the up-chain suppliers also caused a sort of consolidation in who supplies what and how.”
Small grocers today must also accommodate stringent city, county, state and federal regulations. These include expected standards, such as maintaining meat cooler temperatures, but also front door requirements, which stipulate that people have to be able to walk onto your property before they reach the front door. In Freeman’s case, her store contends with the Victorian-era Manchester neighborhood layout with front doors abutting public sidewalks, making it very difficult to comply. (Freeman’s store's "front door" is on the side of the building. You get there by entering the property through a gated outdoor patio.)
Accommodating these legal regulations comes in addition to neighborhood politics — especially when the neighborhood is facing significant development proposals such as a $740 million project in the neighboring Chateau community dubbed Esplanade. In the 15 years Freeman has been in Manchester, her unconventional agricultural interests haven't been universally embraced by all sides of often competing factions within the neighborhood. She even penned a book, “We Don’t Want a F*cking Farm on Our Street” — for sale in her store — which outlines some of the North Side conflict she’s experienced engaging with groups with differing opinions about the direction the neighborhood should take.
Community Support
These are steep slopes for the Freeman Family Farms of the world, but for the time being, Freeman feels she has arrived at the top of a major hill, with her store now open to the community. And while she doesn't have a huge team to manage and pay, there have been several funders and partners along the way that have thrown support behind her efforts. Those include some influential politicians like Mayor Ed Gainey.
“She delivered, you know, and that's the difference,” Gainey said. “I think a lot of people discuss it, but she did more than discuss it. She made it happen.”
Gainey said he understands the challenge of overcoming cultural norms to try to adopt healthier habits and attitudes.
“Growing up, for me, I didn't have an understanding of urban gardening, [or] of urban farming.”
Gainey related a story of a peach tree that came with the first home he and his wife shared.
“She would go grab the peaches off the tree, but I wasn’t gonna eat no peach off the tree. I told her that for me, peaches were in the produce aisle at Giant Eagle.” He said growing up in low-income, Section 8 housing, he was cut off from any kind of agricultural realities.
But he said he supports Freeman’s efforts because he’s wiser about food today and wants urban kids to have a healthier experience. “My generation, we're addicted to what we eat already. . . . The kids — that's the generation you want to understand the consciousness of health and healthy eating.”
Freeman also has the backing of many Manchester residents, including Lachelle Bell. Bell is a lifelong North Sider, now a Manchester resident, who directs entrepreneurship at Catapult Greater Pittsburgh — an organization that tries to help disenfranchised communities achieve economic justice.
“To me, having a store that can provide food [in Manchester] is huge,” Bell said. “Even if it's just like, I need to get eggs and I just need to walk somewhere very fast to get it — [Freeman Family Farm Store] changes the community. And not just, ‘Hey, it's a grocery store.’ It's a community place, you know, she has a greenhouse — that changes the way the whole community looks at food and access to food.”
Freeman went through a year of training as part of Bell’s Catapult Culinary cohort in 2022 — a program designed to help minority food-based businesses. The technical assistance Freeman received gives Bell confidence in her operation.
“She learned everything from, ‘How do I develop my business plan?’ ‘How do I write grants?’ ‘How do I do HR operations?’” Bell explained. And she added that Freeman was unique in the cohort: “Most people come in as caterers, I wanna open a food truck, things like that. She came in like, ‘No, food is social justice; food is equity,’ and ‘How do I build this?’”
Food is medicine
Freeman’s passion for fresh food began soon after she and her family moved to Manchester in 2009 and decided kids in the neighborhood might enjoy gardening. Turns out they did, and so did she.
“They loved playing in the dirt,” Freeman recalled. “Our garden was called Manchester Growing Together Farm.” She said the garden created a new kind of space for kids. “There's no competition. There's no right or wrong. There's no failing. Now all you have to do is water something, care for it, nurture it, take the weeds out. And the kids blossomed.”
She says she found solace and power in spending time with her hands in the soil, and she began studying culinary arts through Bidwell Training Center in Manchester — learning how to cook the produce she was growing. It was all helpful in 2014 when she discovered her husband was terminally ill.
“I started bringing home the food that I was cooking and learning in school, and he ate it, and he loved it,” she said. “And something miraculous started happening.” She said he started to look healthier and found himself in remission from pancreatic cancer.
“The doctor said, well, whatever you're doing, continue it because this is working.”
Freeman says they expected him to live six months, but instead, he lived “seven additional years of a high-quality life.”
“I really am very grateful because we learned at that time that food is medicine.”
Following this gardening path led to the Freemans buying an 11,000-square-foot dilapidated warehouse on Juniata Street in Manchester, tearing it down, and building a farmstead in its place, complete with a greenhouse and garden.
Freeman’s husband Wallace Sapp died in 2021.
“We're doing what we dreamed, and I'm fulfilling the mission that I know my husband would be very proud of to be a part of this — and he is part of this. He is the Freeman Family Farm Store.”
Freeman forges on
Freeman said in some of the dark days after her husband died, she poured herself into grant writing. She’s applied for and received grants from federal, state, county, city and private individuals and foundations including the USDA, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, the Allegheny County Health Department, the Food Trust, the Sampson Foundation, Neighborhood Allies, private neighbors and support from Pittsburgh organizations like Catapult Greater Pittsburgh.
With support she’s received, Freeman hopes to aid children and parents, people with health problems, minority populations and the elderly — her store is in the process of becoming WIC- and SNAP-certified. And she's leaning on the hope that others who care about local health food will step in and pay what they can, and maybe a little more, so that these target populations can afford clean, healthy food, too.
The store operates out of the ground floor of a new building on Juniata Street. Construction was completed in March. Freeman lives upstairs and wants to continue to develop the site. She wants to expand the capacity of the greenhouse so that kids can learn to grow and sell specialty crops; she also sees a need to expand cold storage; and, she's thinking about expanding her tiny flock of "hood chicks": chickens who turn every rare laying session into an Easter egg hunt for Freeman, who searches for their little brown eggs in all corners of their domain.
“Food is a right,” Freeman says. “People should not have to think about fresh fruits and vegetables. Everybody should be able to afford it.”
