About Viable Food Systems

Viable Food Systems exists to help communities open, stabilize, and preserve their grocery stores using a combination of real-world operational experience and practical data tools.

Across the country, communities lose grocery access not because they failed to care, but because the systems around them were not designed to support long-term viability. Stores close quickly. Intervention comes late. And once access is lost, rebuilding becomes significantly harder.

Viable Food Systems was built to change that.

The work focuses on two things:

Helping communities make better decisions before committing time, money, and effort to a grocery project
Providing support when a store is at risk, or when a transition in ownership threatens its future

This includes feasibility studies, capital planning, and operational guidance grounded in how grocery stores actually function, not just how they appear on paper.

At the same time, VFS is building a set of tools designed to improve how food access is understood.

GroundTruth and the Illinois Food Access Map are part of that effort. They move beyond simple distance-based definitions of food deserts and instead look at how communities function in practice, using public data sources such as SNAP retailer data, U.S. Census demographics, and health indicators.

The goal is not just to describe where access is already limited, but to help identify where it is becoming fragile before a closure occurs.

Who This Work Is For

Viable Food Systems works with:

• Communities working to open a grocery store
• Local leaders trying to keep an existing store from closing
• Organizations supporting rural and underserved food systems
• Agencies and partners interested in improving how food access is measured and addressed

Background

Viable Food Systems was founded by Robert Edwards, who spent more than twenty years working in grocery management across urban and rural markets.

That experience included opening stores, operating them under real financial constraints, and seeing firsthand why stores succeed or fail.

He later opened and managed Rise Community Market in Cairo, Illinois, a community effort created to end a seven-year food desert. The store demonstrated what is possible when a community comes together. It also revealed how difficult long-term sustainability can be, even when strong support exists.

That experience shapes the work today.

The goal is not to offer idealized solutions, but to provide communities with realistic, experience-based guidance and better tools than most currently have access to.