After 70 Years, Black Farmers Open First Grocery Store in Birmingham's Fountain Heights

For the first time in nearly 70 years, Birmingham's Fountain Heights neighborhood has its own grocery store. The We All Eat Market and community kitchen opened Nov. 7, launched by the Black-owned Fountain Heights Farms Cooperative founded in 2016 by M. Dominique Villanueva and Christopher Gooden.

The numbers behind the opening tell a bigger story than one storefront. At the ribbon-cutting, Jefferson County Commissioner Sheila Tyson pledged $25,000 and City Councilor LaTonya Tate of District 9 pledged $40,000 — a combined $65,000 in fresh civic money. Tate's pledge follows the $17,000 check she presented last year to give 50 families access to the farm's Community Supported Agriculture program. That works out to roughly $340 of subsidized fresh food per household.

"For almost 70 years, if you lived in Fountain Heights and you needed groceries, you had to leave," said Villanueva. "You had to find a ride or catch a bus or take a long walk or do without, but that ends today. And I want to be really clear about whose store this is. This is not a store that came to Fountain Heights. This is a store from Fountain Heights."

What does the market actually sell?

We All Eat emphasizes organic products. Shelves carry dry goods, bulk bins of grains, beans and candies, fresh juice, canned goods, condiments, toiletries and household items. Fresh herbs grown by Gooden line the wall behind the register, sold in bulk. A produce stand stocks fruits and vegetables grown on the cooperative's own plots and by partner farmers in Tuskegee and Greene County.

Affordability is engineered into the model. The market accepts SNAP and participates in Double Up Bucks, the national incentive program that matches SNAP dollars. CSA subscribers can now add market items to their weekly delivery — a bundling move that turns a delivery service into a full-basket retailer.

The market sits on the first floor of a two-story building called The Heart of the Farm. The facility doubles as a food-entrepreneurship hub: a commercial kitchen gives local chefs access to industrial equipment, the second floor holds an office, and a residential space houses volunteers who need temporary lodging.

How a front-yard garden scaled into a 16-plot operation

The origin story matters for anyone tracking the economics. Villanueva and Gooden moved to Fountain Heights in 2016 and planted a garden in their front yard, then expanded into a formerly blighted lot next door. They set up a free stand stocked with vegetables, canned goods, toiletries and clothes.

Growth followed a patient capital arc. The couple self-funded for years, then layered in donations, grants and city of Birmingham funding. The milestones: a $50,000 Braiding Seeds fellowship from Soul Fire Farm in 2021 plus 18 months of mentorship; a $50,000 grant in 2023 from the National Black Food & Justice Alliance's Resource Commons Initiative; and a July 2025 groundbreaking for The Heart of the Farm's first phase.

Today the cooperative runs 16 farming plots and targets 119 by 2030 — roughly a sevenfold expansion in four years. "We're thinking about this as an entire ecosystem, not just one farm, but a series of farms that's able to feed the community," said Villanueva, listing mushroom plots, a hibiscus field, collards, kale, pumpkins grown for schoolchildren, and a community orchard with three new trees.

2026 has been a landmark year by any measure. The cooperative placed affordable produce across Jefferson County, sent 20 children to free summer camp with the Fountain Heights Neighborhood Association, ran near-weekly food and farm education plus film screenings, graduated three new farmers through a nine-month apprenticeship covering crops, permits, certifications and funding, and built a commercial vegetable processing and cold storage facility for regional farmers.

Why the context is redlining and I-65

Fountain Heights' grocery gap wasn't accidental. Decades of disinvestment, accelerated by housing discrimination and the construction of I-65 — intentionally routed through the predominantly Black neighborhood — depressed property values and scared off quality food retailers. The result: blight, food deserts and food insecurity, with corner shops like Omar's Discount, the only other grocer on the block, selling snacks and sodas but little fresh produce.

"When we cultivate the land, especially when we have hands in the soil, we are reclaiming the system that sought to keep us out," said Villanueva, who studied food sovereignty work from Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver's Tuskegee partnership and activist Karen Washington of Rise and Root Farm.

The ecosystem is already compounding. Urban Impact, the economic development nonprofit that mentored the founders through a business accelerator, just started INSPIRE, a culinary incubator with commercial kitchen space on 55th Place North. CEO Ivan Holloway sees a farm-to-table pipeline: "We definitely see a possibility of working together with Fountain Heights Farms and building a pipeline of opportunity there."

Cicely Garrett, co-director of the National Black Food and Justice Alliance — a coalition of over 70 Black-led organizations — framed the stakes plainly: "When we feed one another, we weaken the state's ability to govern us through scarcity and fear."

For Gooden, the free stand taught the lesson that now anchors the market. "I saw people come first and hoard... and over the weeks to come, as we kept harvesting and reloading the free stand, I saw people come and take what they need and leave the rest for everybody else. That's the fuel that I stand on," he said. His forward promise: "It's not just going to be a neighborhood market... The nourishment starts before you get your food. It's how we treat you when you come in the door."

With 16 plots, two $50,000 grants behind it, $65,000 in new public pledges and a 119-plot target for 2030, Fountain Heights Farms has converted a food desert into a working supply chain — and a template other disinvested neighborhoods can price out.