CINCINNATI — Meiser's Fresh Grocery and Deli, a Lower Price Hill grocery store that helped eliminate a food desert in the community, announced this week it has permanently closed its doors on State Avenue.
"We just couldn't keep operating as we were," Alyson Gerwe, interim executive director of Your Store of the Queen City, the organization that ran Meiser's, said. "It has really left a vacuum as far as fresh, affordable groceries in Lower Price Hill. We were open six days a week."
The storefront is now draped in sheets with its hours of operation covered in duct tape. The closure leaves a significant resource gap for the more than 9,000 neighbors the store served.
Gerwe said the store provided neighbors with more than $1.25 million worth of free and discounted groceries over the course of its five years in operation, including 230,000 pounds of fresh produce.
WATCH: A neighborhood's only grocery store has shuttered. What's next for the area?
"On a personal level, I joined the board of Your Store of the Queen City to fight for food justice. Meiser's is and was a model for that," Gerwe said. "Having to close that and understanding all of the different systemic challenges and the needs of the community, it really does weigh on you."
Gerwe said reasons for the closure include a lack of funding, inflationary pressures and supply chain barriers.
"Cost of goods is extremely high for low volume purchasing," Gerwe said. "That's something that, as we've closed Meiser's, we're thinking about the future and really focusing on how can we combine with our partners to create better buying power so that we can compete with the other area grocers."
Another factor, Gerwe said, was the recent flux in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Women, Infants and Children (WIC) programs. SNAP benefits were delayed during last year's federal government shutdown. Ohio also recently put work requirements in place for SNAP recipients.
"It's really hard to bounce back from (that), especially when you are a nonprofit and attempting to get by," Gerwe said. "In the end, we ran out of funding. In the end, that's all there is to it."
As reported by WCPO news partner WVXU, managers at the market said the closure of the original Meiser's left a hole in the community because the nearest grocery store was a 30-minute walk away, up a challenging hill.
Mary Delaney, executive director of Community Matters, a Lower Price Hill nonprofit that helped launch Meiser's five years ago, said the closure makes it much harder for residents to access basic food items.
"To not have that in the community just makes it that much harder," Delaney said. "We've got some emergency supports in place."
Community Matters runs a neighborhood food pantry that is open multiple days a week, offering fresh produce, dairy, meat and eggs. They also operate a community garden in the warmer months that will begin its initial harvest in a few weeks.
"We've got sort of some emergency supports in place, but we really want to envision, you know, are there other ideas?" Delaney said.
Community Matters plans to host events and a series of ongoing conversations with neighbors to gather input on how to fill the void left by Meiser's and build sustainable food access.
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