Farmacy Marketplace: Traveling grocery store delivers to Delta food deserts

Marquitrice Mangham inherited her family’s Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, farm in 2017, a year after the community leader started a nonprofit organization called In Her Shoes to address housing insecurity and food accessibility in the Delta. It was the same farm where she grew up.

After she graduated from high school in Webb, Mississippi, she left the state, joined the military and then moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where she still resides today. In 2017, when Mangham returned to the Mississippi Delta, she explored her small hometown and noticed that it had become a fresh-food desert.

“The community had changed a lot from when I was young—because I used to be able to come up to town to Webb right up the street from where I graduated (high school) and (find) everything I needed as far as meats and food to eat,” Mangham told the Mississippi Free Press on May 14. “And now, farming, I have to go all the way to, like, Greenwood or Clarkesdale or Charleston just to get a salad or fresh food to eat.”

Expanding Farmacy Marketplace

Her nonprofit, In Her Shoes, had already been helping Delta farmers improve their businesses and boost their food-production rates. In Her Shoes bought a building in Webb and transformed it into Farmacy Marketplace, a fresh-food store filled with produce, meats and goods from local farmers that opened its doors to the community in 2022.

Once Mangham’s work became more publicized, she started getting phone calls from people all over the nation commending her work. The Oakland Chamber of Commerce, from Yalobusha County, was one of the first to call her and make a request for Mangham to open a grocery store in the community.

In 2024, the community leader said she thought Oakland would be a perfect place for Farmacy Marketplace to open up a second brick-and-mortar store because of its “proximity to fresh food,” its population demographics, its location and its closeness to nearby communities that needed access to a grocery store. Oakland’s Farmacy Marketplace opened on April 26, 2025.

“It works well because we really focus on fresh, local food, working with my farmers, and helping them build capacity and sustain their food business,” Mangham said. “We have outlets that they can sell (in), and we encourage them and help them sell to us so we can supply our local stores.”

Mississippians living in food deserts called Mangham and asked her to help bring grocery stores to their communities as well. Mangham visited some of those locations but thought that some of the communities might not be able to sustain a brick-and-mortar grocery store. Nevertheless, she still wanted small-town residents to have access to fresh food.

Around then, the American Heart Association learned about what she was doing in Mississippi and reached out to help fund some projects she was working on, like the Farmacy Marketplace mobile grocery store. The Bernard J. Tyson Impact Fund, part of American Heart Association Ventures’ Social Impact Funds, gave In Her Shoes a $125,000 grant to purchase the mobile food truck in 2024.

Lisa Suennen, managing partner of American Heart Association Ventures, said the association wanted to support Farmacy Marketplace’s effort to create “fresh food access points in the middle of a food desert.”

“When people don’t have access to enough food, access to healthy food or the means to pay for it, they must make tough choices. Rely on fast food to keep the family fed and full? Skip meals? Leave work early to take two buses to a grocery store? Overcoming food insecurity gives more people the opportunity to thrive, which is why it’s an important area of focus for the Heart Association,” she told the Mississippi Free Press.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Local Food Promotion program also helped fund the mission.

Farmacy Mobile is a traveling grocery store with fresh produce and meats, as well as frozen and packaged food. The truck drives food to three underserved communities in the Mississippi Delta weekly: Jonestown on Tuesdays, Coffeeville on Thursdays, and Mound Bayou on Fridays. Times and exact locations are listed on the website.

“We want to focus on those communities that are low-income and low-access. When I say low access, I mean they’re driving 10 miles or more to get fresh food,” Mangham said.

Focusing on the Future

Marquitrice Mangham said the Mound Bayou community heavily supports Farmacy Mobile and could sustain a brick-and-mortar Farmacy Marketplace. Mound Bayou community members helped In Her Shoes find a location for the marketplace. The nonprofit is now looking for funding to help pay to open the new grocery store this year, she said.

The USDA also gives In Her Shoes funding to help farmers grow their businesses. Mangham said she hopes the funding will also help provide farmers with processing facilities to house, package and market food before it goes to stores.

Since Farmacy Marketplace is a small business with only two physical stores and a food truck, the organization is unable to hold an account with major food wholesalers because Mangham would have to order “an enormous amount” of groceries.

“A lot of the larger wholesalers and distributors do not cater to our model or do not cater to small, neighborhood stores,” she said.

But getting told no did not cause Mangham’s determination to waver. She is now thinking about creating a chain of stores and growing the company large enough to hold an account with major wholesalers to increase the quantity of food available to underserved communities, all while still supporting local farmers.

“That’s our whole vision: It’s to have our own local or regional processing hub that sources to these smaller stores, not just Farmacy Marketplace,” Mangham said. “Because like I said, there are other small retailers who have, like, convenience stores or some type of corner store market, but they can’t get fresh food consistently because they can’t meet the requirements of the bigger wholesalers. So we would be able to supply them.”

___

This story was originally published by Mississippi Free Press and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.