In Watts, a local mini market providing healthy food reopens

A local store in Los Angeles, the Watts Up Mini Market, is reopening its doors and continuing in its goal of supporting healthy living and providing grocery access to food deserts and food-apartheid neighborhoods like Watts. 

For decades, Watts has faced systemic disinvestment and a lack of fresh grocery retailers, leading to its classification as an urban food desert by organizations, including the United States Department of Agriculture. 

Watts Up Mini Market looks to close the gap between the lack of full-service grocery stores and a high density of fast-food restaurants and liquor stores in an area that remains predominantly low-income and working-class. 

This Friday, February 13, community members are invited to a ribbon-cutting ceremony for Watts Up Mini Market, a market that will accept EBT and SNAP and sell staples like bread and milk, ensuring local families can access nutritious food without traveling miles away to the nearest supermarket. 

Behind Watts Up Mini Mart is Keisha Daniels, owner of the store and one of the four siblings and friends known as the Sisters of Watts, activists who have advocated for food equity at a local level. 

Sisters of Watts have held free food giveaways, back-to-school drives and sponsored youth basketball and cheerleading teams and have also expanded their work to helping communities secure housing and supportive services for people escaping domestic violence, coming out of homelessness or returning home from incarceration.

At Friday’s event, attendees will be able to hear from Daniels and her experience with Success, Capital Access, and Leadership for Entrepreneurs (SCALE), a free business coaching program that has connected over 6,800 entrepreneurs with no-cost business advising and helped them access capital to open or expand their business. It is through SCALE that Daniels was able to access business coaching and capital from Macedonia Community Development Corporation, a local community lender, which helped with the renovation and reopening of the Watts Up Mini Mart. 

Local and state leadership will also be present at the event, including Congresswoman Maxine Waters; Elmy Bermejo, director of the California Office of the Small Business Advocate; Carolina Martinez, chief executive officer of CAMEO Network, California’s statewide small business network; and Lourdes Castro Ramírez of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA). 

Creative Eats food truck will also be offering free food to everyone in attendance.  

More than a ribbon-cutting, the event also looks to be a hub of information for small business owners interested in receiving support through SCALE. Participants will be matched with appropriate resources based on their specific business needs, stage of development and financing goals.

The event will start at 12 p.m. at 9502 Anzac Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90002. 

It is a free event and open to the public. 

If you are a small business owner looking to receive more information about SCALE, you can complete a quick intake form now.