ALLIANCE, Ohio — StarkFresh, a nonprofit agency that opened grocery stores to help people in food desert communities access affordable food in recent years, will officially close its doors at its Alliance location on Aug. 15.
The Canton StarkFresh grocery store, which opened in 2020, closed at the end of June.
We first introduced you to StarkFresh in 2023 when residents in the Alliance Towers neighborhood were dealing with living in a food desert. Watch more:
RELATED: New grocery store pulls Alliance neighborhood out of a food desert
Customers were excited to finally have a place where they could get groceries.
Now, the funding for the store has dried up, and the same communities are being turned back into food deserts.
Throughout the years, News 5 has reported on StarkFresh's mission to make affordable, healthy food accessible to people in Stark County, but that mission is now coming to an end.
Loni Grisez, a customer and Alliance resident who lives in a lower-income neighborhood, was able to get great deals at the store by using vouchers and coupons on already reduced food prices. Plus — the bread and garden seeds were free.
RELATED: StarkFresh offering food vouchers for seniors
"I like this because they're friendly. They're nice people. It's a good store and it's convenient," said Grisez. "This is kind of hard because a lot of people, we get good deals here. A lot of people are going to be losing out."
StarkFresh will shut down its entire agency on September 1.
"It's a huge loss for everybody, not even just me, just all the customers that I see on a daily basis that depend on this. It's devastating," said StarkFresh store manager Athena Shepherd.
StarkFresh shared in a Facebook post that a "combination of financial and operational challenges" led to the closure decisions.
Lex Phillips, a store program manager fro StarkFresh, stated that state and federal funding for food programs like theirs has been drastically cut, and the nonprofit was no longer able to find alternative grants to keep the store in business.
"The main way that this nonprofit was funded was through grants," said Phillips. "Can't run without enough funds."
"Running out of money. Our executive director has written so many grants this year and none of them have been approved," Shepherd added.
StarkFresh, which once prided itself on solving food desert problems, will be no more, drying up a source of food for neighborhoods once again.
"It's hard for everybody. Absolutely, it's a very emotional time. It's an emotional time for sure," Phillips explained.
