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It turns out Cumberland County might get a grocery store sooner than expected. County staff announced on Thursday, Feb. 13 that a group had notified Cumberland of their plans to renovate an Anderson Highway building that’s seen a lot of uses over the years. 

The building in question is located at 1481 Anderson Highway, that’s across Route 60 from the County Administration building. It was the old Marion’s Bi-Rite and has also been the old Cumberland Hardware store. For anyone not familiar with the property, the building is roughly the size of a Dollar General store. Now grocery stores are zoned by right in the Cumberland Courthouse district, which is where this falls in. That means they don’t have to go through the process to get a conditional use permit. The group can just start working on renovations. Currently, the plans are to renovate both the interior and exterior, as well as the parking lot. 

Cumberland County Administrator Derek Stamey told The Herald that the group wants to sell fresh fruits and vegetables, canned goods, offer freshly cut meat and have a deli counter. 

“It’s a couple of local guys that are gonna open the store,” Stamey said. “We’re going to be trying to do what we can to help them through the process.” 

The timeline is subject to change, but as it stands, the grocery store is on track to open this coming fall. Stamey said he and his staff will also help the group to pursue grants through the Virginia Tobacco Commission and the Virginia Department of Agriculture to help with the startup plans. 

The challenges with bringing in business 

Multiple Cumberland residents have made it very clear what they want. They want another large-sized grocery store. They want restaurants. 

But there’s a catch. In order to get those things, it’s not as simple as just picking up the phone and making a call. To move into an area, companies need to have some questions answered. As we covered last year, when Farmville went through similar arguments, companies look at income levels and they look at housing, as well as housing growth, before agreeing to move to a location. It’s not as simple as announcing that you want a Food Lion or a Publix. In order to make that happen, an area has to meet their requirements. 

Many national grocers, like Aldi or Whole Foods, are very transparent about their requirements and even post them online. Each has their own individual number in mind, in terms of what kind of community fits what they’re looking for. For example, Aldi requires a daily traffic count of more than 20,000 vehicles per day, as well as a “dense trade area population”. What’s that mean? It refers to the total number of people living within the area the business would draw from. Typically, they go for 1,000 people per square mile in urban areas and half that in rural towns and communities. The store itself needs to be at least 22,000 square feet, built on 2.5 acres of land.

Multiple studies back that up. In their paper “How Underserved Areas Attract Grocery Stores”, media research firm Buxton spells out that a company examines the population, visibility, the amount of traffic that goes by specific sites and local competition when considering a move into a new area. Does the company believe there’s enough people who will routinely visit the store to make expansion worth it?

A 2016 study by the University of Minnesota and a 2019 study by New York University echo that. And beyond population numbers, “two of the most frequently reported challenges are the lack of suitable sites and the higher development and operation costs in unproven locations,” the Buxton study says. 

The grocery store problem right now for Cumberland

Cumberland County is identified as a food desert, meaning that residents have limited access to healthy food options. That’s accurate, as a foodbanks.org map shows 13%-17 of residents labeled as “food insecure.” 

Now, to be clear, food insecurity doesn’t mean no options exist. It does however mean there are obstacles in the way. After all, it’s hard to plan on a weekly grocery run if you have no vehicle and no one to give you a ride. At that point, you just take what you can get. It’s also harder to eat healthy when there’s no grocery store in the county. 

Residents in the center of the county have the farthest to travel, in order to get food. Most travel to Powhatan, Buckingham, Goochland, or Farmville to get groceries or they pick them up on their way home from work. Over the last couple of years, the arrival of a Dollar General Market and Pine View Bulk Foods have helped some, but there are still challenges. If you live in the Cartersville or Columbia area, for example, you wouldn’t often make the trip to Pine View, as it’s close to Farmville. 

The hope is that a new grocery store will help drive those numbers down.