Fresh Choice Manchester program looks to bring fresh produce to underserved neighborhoods

MANCHESTER, N.H. – Not every Queen City resident can readily access fresh fruits and vegetables, a challenge that has a direct impact on their health. However, the Manchester Health Department’s Fresh Choice Manchester Program looks to address that challenge.

Based on an earlier USDA program, Fresh Choice Manchester aims to expand on a 2022 pilot program seeking to help convenience stores in certain areas of the city provide fresh fruits and vegetables to their customers.

While those with transportation can head to supermarkets or other grocers to get fresh produce, Fresh Choice Manchester allows access to those without reliable transportation who rely on their neighborhood’s corner stores, particularly those in areas that more than half a mile from a full-service supermarket considered to be “food deserts.”

One of the five stores currently participating in the program is La Bonne Semence on Wilson Street, opened by Congolese natives Esther Kandosi and Claud Adaya in 2020 to serve those looking for hard-to-find African products here in New Hampshire.

The store, French for “the good seed,” became part of the Healthy Corners Program in 2024.

“I enjoy the assistance in obtaining fresh food and look forward to working with the program,” said Kandosi through an interpreter. “We’ve seen more customers come to the store, especially in the summer time, and often it is because the prices of the items that they can get are lower than what they might find at Market Basket.”

About a mile away on the corner of Merrimack and Maple, R&E Grocery is another participant in the program.

Like Kandosi, R&E Co-owner Alden Wilson has had a positive experience with the program given that it’s drawn customers to his store and kept existing customers happy.

“People really like the savings, so that brings them in and a lot of customers don’t have a car to get to, say, a Market Basket,” he said. “So, it’s important to them to be able to come in and grab a tomato or an orange or a banana or whatever.”

The produce itself is provided by Fresh Start Farms, an organization based on Spruce Street that helps refugee and immigrant farmers in the Concord area get their goods to market.

Fresh Start Farms was able to team up with the Health Department after the city received American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding, with that funding available until the end of 2026.

According to Fresh Start Farms Food Access Manager Maya Caron-Ward, part of the program’s success comes from her organization’s non-profit mission, which allows the five stores in the program to buy at bulk rates normally available only to supermarkets. The stores are also able to take advantage of Fresh Start’s participation in the Double Up Food Bucks program, which provides additional savings for customers using EBT Cards.

Caron-Ward believes there are enough private donors available to help continue the program after ARPA funding runs out given its importance to combating food deserts in the city by helping corner stores turn a profit on fruits and vegetables that might not see otherwise without Fresh Start Farms’ wholesale rates.

“It’s a really great program for the stores, with it they can get smaller amounts at wholesale prices. One of the biggest obstacles we found for small stores is that before they would have to buy their produce straight from Walmart or Market Basket or Hannaford and they’d make almost no profit off it,” she said.

“Especially on the city’s West Side, there’s nowhere to buy food except at a corner store if you don’t have transportation or are (immunologically) compromised. For people with that level of accessibility to food, it’s especially hard to get fresh fruits and vegetables,” she added.

The program is a component of the Health Department’s Healthy Food Access Plan. More information on the Healthy Food Access Plan can be found here.