Lower Price Hill’s innovative community store bridges food gaps

From the outside, Meiser’s Market looks like your standard convenience store. But there’s a lot more to it.

Jasmine Taylor manages the small white and blue shop along State Avenue in Lower Price Hill. She walks through the store as customers come in to chat and pick up groceries.

There’s a rainbow of produce at the front. Greens, tomatoes, bananas, grapefruit, pineapples — all things that have been hard to find in Lower Price Hill in the past. Freezers along one side hold nutritious, pre-prepared meals for busy families. All of these items are free, provided by Cincinnati nonprofits like LaSoupe and the Freestore Foodbank.

Taylor says the produce is a boon for residents who otherwise find themselves making long bus rides or walks to get to a grocery store.

“People are excited pretty much just to see anything they can get and utilize,” she says. “Especially if you cook. If you know how to cook you see this as a gold mine because you can create so many different meals.”

Toward the back, there’s a microwave to heat up the prepared meals, something Taylor says helps people in the neighborhood without easy access to cooking equipment.

A unique hybrid

Not everything in the store is free. The rest of the market is just like a scaled-down grocery store, with shelves full of things you can buy. It has everything from canned beans to hot sauce to toiletries and pharmacy products in cases.

Many Lower Price Hill residents have both strong Cincinnati and Appalachian roots. Taylor always tries to keep a few specific items they love on the shelves.

“We have chili, sausage gravy — that’s a really popular thing,” she says. “Also something that I would have never thought that people would come in and buy. They love it. People show me pictures of these breakfasts they make with the biscuits and gravy. I just love seeing it.”

There’s even a deli in the back where customers can get lunch meat and premade sandwiches, just like you’d find at a larger grocery.

It all adds up to a unique hybrid in a community that struggles with poverty and food access. It’s not exactly a food pantry, nor is it a full-size grocery store. And it’s more than the kind of corner store where you’d find snacks and soda. It’s a little of all of the above — and a community hub as well.

A community cornerstone closes

Karen Preston is working the register. A lifelong Lower Price Hill resident, she has a special connection to this place. She shows me old photographs of the store from decades ago.

“The butcher is Eddie Wineford, over here,” she says pointing at one photo. “He worked for Carl and Bob Meiser. Eddie is actually my granddaughter’s grandpa. So it’s always been in the family.”

For more than 50 years, family-owned Meiser’s Market was a lifeline for the neighborhood. Carl Meiser ran the store until he retired in 2017. Meiser’s closed, and it became much harder to find food in the neighborhood.

Data from the USDA shows more than half of the residents of Lower Price Hill have experienced food insecurity in the last few years.

Preston says the closure of the original Meiser’s left a hole in the community, because then the nearest grocery store was a half-hour walk up a towering hill.

“Most people down here don’t drive, and they’d have a hard time getting food,” she says. “They’d go to food pantries and things like that.”

A neighborhood-centered solution

The market sat empty for a couple years. But local nonprofits like Community Matters and Price Hill Will saw an opportunity. The latter eventually acquired the property using a grant from the city.

Desirae Hosley is the interim executive director of Your Store for the Queen City, another nonprofit that helped set up Meiser’s. She says there was a clear need for something new in Lower Price Hill.

“I’ve seen the mother with three kids and a stroller and 60 bags trying to go up some steps,” she says. “And it’s like, ‘How on earth are you doing this?’ “

The effort to address the neighborhood’s food access struggles started with pop-up free produce events outside the store in 2019. After renovation work, Meiser’s opened its doors again as a market in late 2021.

Hosley said the store is centered on what Lower Price Hill residents say they want and need. That extends to hiring staff from the neighborhood.

“Our focus is to be like a smaller grocery store,” she says. “Kroger isn’t in the neighborhood. Our idea is that you could have accessibility in the neighborhood. The idea of hiring neighbors is so they could walk from home and be right around the corner.”

Employees and residents say the store is a community hub — a place to meet and catch up with neighbors. That’s especially true on Tuesdays, when the store hosts a free community meal.

Building connections — and health

On a recent Tuesday evening, people come in from drizzly weather and filter through the community room attached to the store for cabbage and potato soup. It’s a savory, slightly spicy recipe Taylor devised to show off what customers can do with the free produce the store offers.

Preston ladles out the soup and gives out bread as people mill around talking, taking in an art exhibition on the walls and visiting tables set up by the American Kidney Foundation and Preschool Promise.

“That’s our goal every Tuesday — to have people be here to educate everyone,” Taylor says. “So we’ve got someone here who can talk about how healthy food helps your kidneys, and we’ve also got someone who can help you enroll your kid in preschool. While people are eating, they’re also listening, and remembering who they meet.”

The health angle is important, Taylor says. In addition to building social connections, she and Hosley hope Meiser’s might be a way to improve the neighborhood’s health outcomes. Lower Price Hill ranks near the top of Cincinnati neighborhoods when it comes to diet-related conditions like diabetes.

But Taylor sees change happening in small ways.

“The kids who come in here, when we have those oranges and apples, they choose those,” she says. “A lot of people have this stigma where they feel like kids are just going to go for the chips and the soda. But if you don’t have other options, you don’t get to see what they’ll pick. So I love the fact I get to see that on a day-to-day basis.”

Now a few years into operations, Hosley says Your Store of the Queen City hopes to show the Meiser’s model to other nonprofits to help them find their own unique solutions to struggles with food access.

“We have the blueprint,” she says. “So why wouldn’t we share the blueprint to help other organizations thrive in their neighborhoods?”

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