About 40 mobile markets have sprung up around the United States in the past few years as a strategy to provide healthy food choices to communities identified as food deserts—communities with a low food access. These communities are mostly poor, often minority and frequently have high levels of nutrition related illnesses, such as obesity, heart disease, and type II diabetes. Mobile markets in the form of buses, trucks, or semi-trailers outfitted with refrigeration, cash registers, credit and electronic transfers retailing equipment are a low-cost alternative to establishing brick-and-mortar stores to provide healthy food access to multiple locations. In fact, one of the earliest mobile markets, People’s Grocery’s mobile market Oakland, California started as a plan for a brick and mortar store; those plans were changed to a mobile market in response to a lack of funding (Community Commons, 2012). However, studies of whether and how effective mobile markets are in providing greater access to fresh foods or increasing farm sales are scarce.
The goal of this cooperative agreement with the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) was to investigate whether mobile food markets may be effective in facilitating healthy food choices to their communities. The objectives of the research were to: (1) understand who does and who does not use mobile markets and why, and (2) investigate whether mobile produce markets have the potential to alter attitudes and food choices, and if so, how.