Opening a city-run grocery store was part of Ayah Al-Zubi’s successful run last year for Cambridge City Council. While she campaigned, a group that included Cambridge government officials, agency staff, civic groups and nonprofit experts explored opening a store much like what Al-Zubi imagined, but ended the work as the White House shut down the national food benefits program known as Snap.
Both efforts grew from the closing of Daily Table in May. The low-cost, nonprofit grocery store chain shut down after 10 years, including a Central Square location that had been open a little over four years at 684 Massachusetts Ave. Leaders blamed tariff policies from the Trump White House for an “uncertain and difficult funding environment.”
By the time Al-Zubi was running for office, the idea of publicly owned grocery stores, run without profit motive, was a theme in Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York and a Boston City Council legislative session.
“With Trump’s tariffs and cuts on nonprofits, they’re getting worse than ever,” Al-Zubi said in a campaign video, referring to grocery prices. “There is something we can do. What if Cambridge ran its own grocery store? It’s not a crazy idea … grocery sales covered most of the Daily Table’s operations. With a little support from the city, we can make sure everyone has access to fresh and affordable foods to live a dignified life while building community.”
Al-Zubi didn’t know during her campaign that the city was already part of talks for a replacement nonprofit grocer – the name Central Market was discussed – to go into a space at 565 Massachusetts Ave., empty since the April closing of Hilton’s Tent City. The idea, mentioned by council candidate Robert Winters during a Sept. 20 campaign event, has since been discussed with The Independent by Sasha Purpura, the former chief executive of Daily Table; Tom Evans, executive director of the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority; and Michael Monestime, president of the Central Square Business Improvement District.
While city manager Yi-An Huang felt the team “put together a pretty good plan,” from his perspective there were always concerns about whether the Daily Table model was sustainable. Cambridge happily supported it, but that support was increasing, he said Monday. An initial contribution of $60,000 became $100,000 in each of the 2023 and 2024 fiscal years and leaped to $150,000 in the final year, “when they came to us and said things were really tough.”
Huang confirmed being in talks after Daily Table closed. But rather than being focused specifically on a grocery store, Huang said, he recalled “conversation about food insecurity more broadly. The idea for a food hub and Central Market had come up.”
Short life of an idea
The Central Market concept lived from August to November.
Daily Table made it “very clear that the model works,” Purpura said, but the chain also misstepped over the years, in her view, by not supplementing its revenues with financial donations. By the time Purpura started that effort as chief executive, it was “too late to build the philanthropic base that we needed to keep up with the size we were already at … and then, of course, all the government stuff going on complicated everything. And Covid.”
Central Market plans included various supports from the start: Purpura was working with the Cambridge Community Foundation; the CRA; and the Business Improvement District. “Building up that philanthropy from the beginning is an incredibly viable solution, because we can get it to 75 percent earned income,” Purpura said.
Local food pantries too were involved through a desire to create a space for gathered goods and services, Purpura said.
The project began with momentum – not just because of all the people and organizations involved, but because Monestime had managed to rescue every piece of equipment from Daily Table except the refrigerators, paying $2,500 for the lot and having the BID’s ambassadors wheel and carry it across Massachusetts Avenue. The thinking was “all they have to do is get refrigerators and they essentially have a store ready to go,” Monestime said.
Having to build out the Hilton’s space was a complication, Purpura said, but necessary: The landlord of Daily Table had signed a lease with the Union Comedy troupe to remake 684 Massachusetts Ave. into a theater and club. Purpura was in talks with donors, a few of whom had committed to initial $10,000 gifts, but “we needed probably six, eight months to raise the funds before being tied to the lease,” she said. “That’s asking a lot” of a landlord. Purpura was also uncertain about moving into a space where five years later, reconstruction would force Central Market to find a new home.
Powerful supporters shift attention
Among the partners, the CCF already had food insecurity as a pillar of its five-year strategic plan and Huang wanted to see Central Market happen, Monestime said. “He understands the need of community members and the cost of food and where the country is right now, and how food insecurity needs to be prioritized.”
In October, though, Trump announced an abrupt end to federal benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, for which more than 10,000 people in Cambridge – just under one-tenth of the population – are eligible, poverty agencies say.
The city and CCF shifted to quickly commit $500,000 to help feed those who lost their food subsidy. The funds included support for the Cambridge Food Pantry Network and grocery store gift cards for former Snap recipients such as families, seniors and people with disabilities. “I wouldn’t say it was a pivot,” Huang said. “We understood Snap was a crisis we had to address. There was no decision to say, ‘We’re not going to do this [grocery store].’ In the end, we didn’t move forward because the amount of funding needed was too great.”
In light of the perceived change in city attention, though, “me and Mike and Geeta and Tom from CRA had a meeting, and I said in sort of a come-to-Jesus moment, are people still in this?” Purpura said, referring to Geeta Pradhan, president of the Cambridge Community Foundation. “I called Mike and said, this isn’t the right time. Later that week, I emailed everybody and thanked them.”
“The city and CCF already care and pour money into hunger relief, but given what was going on, they weren’t in a place to get behind this idea,” Purpura said. “It’s devastating that we’re not looking at things that go beyond food pantries. At the same time, I understand that we have what we have.”
With that decision, the fixtures rescued from Daily Table by the Business Improvement District were cleared out of the Hilton’s space and given to local food pantries such as the Margret Fuller House, Monestime said.
Central Square Demonstration Plan
Evans saw even more poignancy in how the Central Market idea ended. “There was a moment in time when right after Daily Table closed, even after the space itself transitioned to a different use, there was the infrastructure of the workers and Sasha and still some connective tissue of that organization. That was the opportune moment before everyone dispersed into other things in their lives,” Evans said. “Then Snap suddenly changed. All the focus and resources went that way, for all the right reasons, and caused us to miss some of the opportunity to make an easier, quicker start.”
Groundwork is being laid to do things better. The Cambridge Redevelopment Authority is collaborating with the BID on the Central Square Demonstration Plan, a mechanism to expedite real estate transactions, Evans said.
“If this mechanism was in place when we were confronted with something like Daily Table closing, it would have enabled us to maybe move more quickly to try to secure the property or a more creative lease structure,” Evans said. Instead of grocery store appliances and shelving being carted to the Hilton’s space, they could have stayed where they were and the Central Market team could have picked up directly where Daily Table left off.
A conversation about the demonstration plan is scheduled for 5 to 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Street Theory Collective, 541 Massachusetts Ave., Evans said, to inform the CRA’s consideration of the plan this spring. (The meeting is rescheduled to 5 to 7 p.m. March 3 due to bad weather.)
The city remains “in support of broader efforts” to feed people, Huang said.
Prepared for next time
Hunger also remains a concern for Al-Zubi for the city in general and specifically in Central Square, Porter Square and East Cambridge, she said in a Tuesday call. But with talk of a food pantry hub underway, she wants to be sure what she does “is not undermining the people who do that work.”
Bringing back Daily Table shoppers’ sense of community would be wonderful, Al-Zubi said, and like Pupura she wonders if an improved grocery store model is ultimately more resilient when it comes to handling a federally imposed crisis. She asked about it at her first council meeting, she said: “Are we set up for possible future setbacks if the federal administration decides they want to attack Snap again? What are we doing now to not need the degree of reactivity that we had the last time?”
There has been no recent word on Boston or New York grocery store plans – except for a publicity stunt by a betting site called Polymarket, which ran a five-day brick-and-mortar food pantry that it called “New York’s first free grocery store.” Mamdani responded with a meme.
Al-Zubi said she wouldn’t be surprised to hear more about Boston and New York plans in the next few months.
Purpura, who before running Daily Table was executive director of the nonprofit Food for Free, said she has not been contacted by Al-Zubi but still sees great economic benefit in a grocery store that feeds and returns money to the community with living-wage jobs, especially as a nonprofit with critical municipal support.
“The conversation needs to keep going,” she said. “Whether it’s Cambridge or elsewhere, there’s so much more momentum around it that, at some point, it’s going to be the right timing, the money’s going to be there and somebody’s going to pick it up and make it happen.”
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