Partnership for a Healthier America announces commitments with leading retailers to bring healthy foods to communities with low access

Today, the Partnership for a Healthier America announced commitments with leading grocery retailers to build or expand stores in areas with low access to healthy, affordable food.

We applaud the Partnership and the retailers – including Brown’s Super Stores, Calhoun Enterprises, Klein Family ShopRite, SUPERVALU, Walgreens and Walmart, along with The California Endowment’s FreshWorks Fund – to find enterprising ways to bring healthy, fresh and affordable foods to vulnerable children, families and communities that currently have no options or access to these foods locally.

One of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s core beliefs is that all people – and particularly vulnerable children – deserve access to good food.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 23.5 million Americans, including 6.5 million children, live in low-income areas that lack stores likely to sell healthy and affordable fresh foods.

The Kellogg Foundation believes that increasing access to grocery retailers is one of several strategies for improving children’s and families’ access to good food. Thriving farmers’ markets, community gardens and other locally-owned food retailers also play important roles in community health, as do strategies to improve affordable transportation options.

Learn more about commitments brokered by the Partnership for a Healthier America.

Learn more about the Kellogg Foundation’s Food & Community Program at www.foodandcommunity.org.

The Partnership for a Healthier America is an independent, nonpartisan, organization that will mobilize broad-based support for efforts to solve the child obesity challenge. The partnership emerged out of a series of conversations between The California Endowment, Kaiser Permanente, Nemours, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Alliance for a Healthier Generation. Learn more at www.ahealthieramerica.org.