It’s known as the barbecue capital but grocery stores closing on both sides of Kansas City have created food deserts.

In Kansas City, Missouri, the Sun Fresh grocery store shut its doors in August, and just six miles away, the Merc Co+op in downtown Kansas City is set to close by the year’s end.

These closures leave local residents without convenient access to fresh and healthy groceries, forcing them to rely more heavily on processed and fast foods.

Both grocery stores were located in neighborhoods with a history of redlining, a practice that systematically denied services to residents based on race or ethnicity. With these closures, those seeking fresh groceries will now need to travel over a mile in either direction, often relying on public transport to haul their groceries back home.

Kristina Bridges, a research assistant professor at the University of Kansas Medical Center’s department of family medicine and community health, explained that you live in a food desert if you can not get to a full service grocery store easily.

She told The Beacon: Kansas City that the University of Kansas’s Medical system has been mapping food insecurity among its patients since 2017 and found a strong correlation between historic redlining and rates of type-2 diabetes and food insecurity in those neighborhoods. 

‘We have big food insecurity bubbles, big Type 2 diabetes bubbles,’ she said. 

‘They were north, where downtown KC and the Merc is, and the east side where the Sun Fresh was. If we pull out our old redlining maps, it’s exactly the same pattern.’

The Merc Co+op grocery store in downtown Kansas is set to close at the end of the year, which will leave nearby residents with food insecurity

Sun Fresh grocery store in Kansas City closed in August

Against the backdrop of its beautiful skyline, Kansas City is facing a food desert crisis

Kristina Bridges, a research assistant professor at the University of Kansas Medical Center’s department of family medicine and community health, defined food deserts as areas where it is not easy to get to a full service grocery store

The correlation between food insecurity and redlining has led some to label the problem as ‘food apartheid’ instead of food desert, because deserts occur naturally and they contend the problem was actually created by man-made systems. 

Chronic diseases such as type-2 diabetes, obesity and hypertension are more common in food deserts.

Bridges said even some doctors need to be educated as she had an experience where a medical practitioner told her he didn’t believe food insecurity was an issue because, ‘his patients were all fat.’

Bridges said that missed the point because living in a food desert could cause chronic stress that releases cortisol and cause health problems that include obesity. 

A food desert does not mean people are starving to death and have no access to food at all. It means they only have easy access to unhealthy and processed foods that can lead to obesity more easily.

She defined the problem saying, ‘in the past 12 months, have you run out of food before you could get more? If the answer is yes, you have food insecurity’.

Food deserts in Kansas City have existed for decades, and Dina Newman, the director of the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Center for Neighborhoods, lived in one in the 1980s while she was a single mother without a car. 

She recalled what that experience was like: ‘So if I’m working … I have to plan it out to get to the bus to get over to a store. Then l’m waiting at the bus stop, which is sometimes just a patch of dirt,’ she said. 

The struggle for access to fresh fruit and vegetables is real for Kansas City residents

Phillip Ramsey is a master gardener who’s planting fall produce in one of the community gardens he manages to help residents

‘Then I have to transfer buses with a full load of groceries. What about my child, are they with me? Am I safe alone after dark? You are juggling all this just trying to get to the grocery store, that’s the challenge.’

The lack of access to grocery stores often pushes people to less healthy local options such as corner stores and gas stations. 

Community gardener Phillip Ramsey told The Beacon: Kansas City: ‘I can’t throw a rock without hitting a fried chicken spot.

‘So we’re eating processed food, cheap food that we can get our hands on, because access to fresh healthy food is not an option for us.’

He is working to help the community by growing and giving away more than 1,000 pounds of produce. However, he knows it is only a temporary fix.

‘I’ve seen an uptick in neighbors needing the service of the community garden,’ Ramsey said. 

Food deserts impact both urban and local populations, but there is a significant racial disparity in who is affected. 

A 2024 USDA report determined that eight percent of white households face food insecurity, while the number is 21 percent for black households – almost two and a half times more. For Hispanic families, the number is 16.9 percent.

There is a strong correlation between historic redlining and rates of type-2 diabetes and modern food insecurity in Kansas City neighborhoods

That report will be the last of its kind for the foreseeable future as the Trump administration called it, ‘redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous.’ 

Both Sun Fresh and Merc Co+op closed because of the financial difficulties of running a grocery store in historically disinvested neighborhoods. 

Community Builder, the nonprofit developer that used to run Sun Fresh, said it faced a myriad of problems and lost about $5 million operating it from February 2022 until August this year. 

On the other side of the city, Merc Co+op has faced similar challenges. The store was the result of a $7 million investment by the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City. 

But after three years of planning and five years of operation, the Merc Co+op announced in June that it would be closing at the end of the year.