Here is a video from Grocery Retail for All Summit at Global Food Institute at The George Washington University sharing the work we have been doing at Compassion Coalition and Bargain Grocery.
Transcript from the George Washington Grocery Retail for All Summit: Affordable, Nutritious Food in Every Neighborhood – December 13, 2024.
Session by Mike Servello, CEO of Compassion Coalition and Bargain Grocery.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the integrity of the original content.
Oh, good morning. Good morning. Amazing, amazing group of people. I’m just awed. You know,
we’re as diverse as the areas that we come from. My name is Mike Servello. I’m the founder and
CEO of an organization called Compassion Coalition and also Bargain Grocery. We’re unique, I
call it a unique, innovative, self-sustaining 501c3 not-for-profit.
We’re in Utica, New York, one of the most impoverished cities in upstate New York. We actually
still have over 28% poverty. However, the national average is 12%. We’re a refugee city with
actually almost a quarter of our population now is foreign born. The refugee center in Utica that
literally the refugees saved our city and the decline in the late nineties, but anyway, for us at
Compassion, we’ve been blessed. We’re working out of our new 150,000 square foot
distribution. We just got this 2 years ago. The governor of our state helped us. This is a $12
million dollar building. We got $4,000,000, okay, and a tax receipt. The governor gave us two,
and the rest we did. We’re debt free in this building.
We’ve got massive capacity. There’s over 100,000 square feet of dry storage. And then we’ve
got 20,000 square feet of frozen, but that’s ground. But actually, when you calculate the actual
space, we can triple stack. We’ve got 60,000 square feet of frozen capacity. When we started 24
years ago, I had an 800 square foot freezer. This week alone, we received four trailer loads of
ice cream. We’ve got 15,000 square feet of refrigerated space.
Compassion Coalition donates millions and millions of dollars in goods regionally and locally.
Things like personal hygiene products, soaps, shampoos, toothpaste, paper products, towels,
diapers and paper towels, small household appliances, you know, coffee makers, toasters. New
clothing, trailer loads of clothing. We just supplied all of the area schools, impoverished schools,
with children’s underwear and socks, brand new. Food, fresh produce, dairy, protein, chicken.
So we receive mass donation loads that we donate out, plus we receive products that we buy,
sell, which get stored.
We operate two, now two, grocery locations. We started the Utica Bargain Grocer in 2000, we
started Compassion in 2000 and figured out, like, giving stuff away without funding doesn’t last
very long. And so I got this idea, you’ve got to create a way to sustain the operation. We’ve got a
Walmart distribution center, they just opened a perishables distribution. I went to them and I
said, that’s just your donation. Can I buy any salvage excess? They started to sell it to us. We
marked it up a little bit.
Opened up a 1,200 square foot store. And we’ve been in that space for 16 years. About 5 years
ago, 6 years ago, the state encouraged us to open a brand new store. You’ll see that, that’s a
brand new store, 15,000 square feet, with the help of ESD and others, we built this in a food
desert. The street, they laughed at me, it’s a one way street, there were murders on it, high
crime, that street has transformed the city, so that 15,000 square foot store, you’ll see it’s jam
packed every day.
We just opened this year in Troy, New York. Troy, New York, a bedroom community of Albany,
the capital of the state. Not one grocery store in the entire city.
———— community, paid for the entire store. Another 15,000 square foot store. To give you an idea of the scope, just in Utica, we have 15 employees. 15 employees. And a lot of people, we hire people with barriers to employment. We speak eight different languages in our store. It is so cool. Because the employees, a lot of them are refugees, they’ll go around and use Google Translate. So you’ve
got Ukrainian girls talking to Burmese folks that go, but they love each other. When you walk
into the store, it’s such a sense of community, like somebody said, food is love, that people feel
a palpable presence of love. It’s just amazing.
Our mission: To offer low cost, high quality, nutritious food with a heavy emphasis on fresh fruits,
vegetables, dairy, and protein. So our target is people on EBT. We’re literally, between the
Compassion and our grocery store, we’re serving over 5 million people a year. 100,000 people a
week.
Our quality grocery model versus a traditional food bank. I really had no intent to start a grocery
store. We were going to give food away because our city was in a free fall, so much poverty. But
we realized we couldn’t keep giving food away without some way to pay for it. And so I thought,
let me start this salvage store to generate enough money to give the product away through
compassion, not realizing the food insecurity, food dignity, all these things, food deserts. Cornell
came in and did a study on it, Cornell University, it’s available for you out there, the QR code at
the end.
Here’s what Cornell came up with. Food banks provide 14 percent, this is Cornell, Food banks
provide 14 percent of the food their average participant requires. Free food will not solve food
insecurity. People in low income neighborhoods have no choice but to shop at bodegas and
minimarts due to the price and transportation barriers.
So we started to realize the importance of nutritious food, and a lot of the salvage stuff we got
was produce. So fresh fruits and vegetables. You know, food is medicine. If you can believe this,
in our one store in Utica, 15,000 square feet, I want you to grasp this, we sell a tractor trailer
load of produce a day. A day, like I watch sometimes in grocery stores, they’re putting out,
they’re putting out like 12 pints of strawberries. We put out strawberries by the pallet.
Sometimes we’ll get a salvaged trailer load of bananas. We’ll sell a trailer of bananas within two
weeks. It’s unbelievable.
With SNAP, you know, we heard about SNAP and Double Up Bucks. When we started to offer,
we crushed the system in the state. It broke down. We did so much Snap. We’re doing now in
the Troy store a basic nutrition education program. You know, we’re trying everything we can to
make people aware. But, you know, in a city filled with refugees, it’s an amazing thing that, you
know, when you go to give food away, and you want to do the right thing, give them a food box
from the food bank, the refugees go through and throw this away and throw that away. They
wanted fresh produce. They had different diet ratings. And so, we thought, let’s focus in, let’s
give them what they want.
Now, the why of what we do, you know, when you think about why you do it, why it speaks to
motivation, I think people do it for other kinds of reasons. Some people do it for money. You see
a lot of stores fail, because if you’re going to do it for money, you’re not going to make it. If
you’re doing it for recognition, good luck, because that’s not going to last very long. But if you’re
doing it on a mission, or with a passion, and you focus on people, that’s going to sustain you.
Because I find that people with a passion are unstoppable.
See, we’re driven by a passion to help and lift people up. Like I said, we hire people with
barriers to employment, we hire a lot of refugees. When I look, I see people. When I think about
our store, I see the elderly that are struggling. I want to make it easier for them. I see single
parents with children. You know, I told you we got four trailers of ice cream. Always in our store,
ice cream was one dollar. You could get Ben & Jerry’s for a dollar, Jenny’s for a dollar. You know
the thrill of a family that couldn’t afford ice cream. How about novelty boxes, you know, that are
8, 9, 10 dollars? We’re one dollar ice cream. They go look in the case and they’re able to buy it.
Everybody’s got ice cream.
We don’t put a lot of candy out. Instead of candy, we’ve got apples. But that produce will be, our
target is to be 30 to 40 percent below Walmart. And by the grace of God, we’ve been able to do
it. See, we see, we want to help the disabled, the working families that are trying to make ends
meet. Veterans, refugees.
And not only that, but our community impact, what you’re seeing here, these are, go back there,
the community impact is, we ship, we probably ship a trailer load of food a week to Queens. To
9 Million Reasons, and here you see people lined up. These are a lot of these are homeless and
people impoverished that we serve every week through a church there. A 40 foot trailer and
more than us are helping her.
See, when you talk about food access and food equality, food dignity, there’s something to be
said about giving people the power to choose. Like, versus if you’re having a hard time, here’s
your choice. Take it or leave it. Or to say, look. Here’s food at an affordable price, right where
you live, in your neighborhood. So, it gives them dignity. It’s their power of choice. Buy what you
want, where you want it.
Again, Cornell did a study. We had no control over it. A $100 basket at our store is equivalent to
$438 in a basket anywhere else. Bargain Grocery impacts over 25 percent of the households in
Utica. And look at this, refugees comprise 25 percent of our customer base. Our goal, again it’s
passion, it’s not money. Our goal is that no one goes hungry in Utica. So what we do is we work
with all the human service agencies and we say this, we want to preserve a person’s dignity.
If you’re from the Rescue Mission, or you’re from the United Way, and you’ve got a family that
you don’t have funding for, there’s no money, just call us, give the name, there’ll be a gift card
waiting for them. A lot of times we hand out gift cards at the store. So someone can come in and
shop, just like everybody else, right, there’s no stigma.
Our people are so passionate. See, there’s a culture. And I’ve got to stop my staff a lot of times,
because they don’t make a lot of money from reaching into their own pockets to buy food for
people. I tell them, listen, we’ll give them a gift card. When we first opened, I had a lady walk in
and she said to me, I want to give, here’s a hundred dollars, I want to give a hundred dollars,
you know, pay it forward, how about this, let’s go to the register and let’s get them ten $10 dollar
gift cards and we’ll tell the cashiers that whenever somebody’s coming through that’s either on
EBT or things you need, give them the gift card.
So she steps back, we’re talking, this lady comes through with a bunch of kids, her bill is $10.12
cents, she’s trying to get change, she gives the $10.12. The cashier gives her back 10. She
starts to cry. She said, that lady paid it forward. The lady starts to cry. She saw an immediate
result of her giving.
I want to just show you as I end, a three year comparison. I say, I call this, we turn waste into
wonder. We literally, and it’s a shame, I think we need to think about the food system. There’s so
much waste. But listen, I hope we learn from this. We can do it a lot more efficiently. We’ve had
to survive on the crumbs that nobody else wanted. Like, okay, well, the food bank doesn’t want
I’m not, not any food bank. Please hear me. I’m just saying there’s more than one way to do
things over a three year period. I’m not going to tell you which food bank, but a three year
comparison, one right near us, the food bank received $52 million in cash, cash donations, not
including donated products. And they gave away $87 million regionally.
That’s wonderful. And in the same three year period, as you can see, I’m not good at raising
money. We received $265,000. I’m going to repeat that $265,000 in three years compared to
$52 million and I repeat myself $265,000 compared to $52 million and we gave away $125
million in product. I want to tell you right now, this year, 2024, we’re going to eclipse a hundred
million dollars in donated products. Our store, our unit of the store alone, is going to do over five
million dollars in sales. Troy is off and running.
I think we can transform the food system. It’s an honor to be here. I love what I’m hearing. You
know, it’s just as diverse as we are. And I think all of us together can make a big change in
America. Thank you all.
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