Baldwin's unusual town-owned and operated grocery store is coming to a close in March

The town of Baldwin made national headlines in 2019 when it opened its own grocery store after the only for-profit grocer in town closed and residents lost what many take for granted — a convenient spot to roll a shopping cart down aisles and return home with bags of fresh food.

A Baldwin resident enthused at the time that the Baldwin Town Council's willingness to fill the void "can be said to be 'only in Baldwin.' I am hometown proud."

The town-run store, called Baldwin Market, has struggled for years, however, to reach the break-even point. Now, it's on a path to close next month.

"I'm very sad to see it," said Baldwin Mayor Sean Lynch.

The last day is scheduled to be March 18 for shoppers to pick up fresh produce, homemade pies, assorted meats in sizes ranging from a serving to a caseload, and all the other staples that end up in pantries.

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With a population of about 1,400 in a rural part of southwest Duval County, Baldwin lacked the customer base to sustain a for-profit grocer business in recent years. Closing the town-owned grocery store will require residents to hit Interstate 10 for miles-long drives to Macclenny in neighboring Baker County or to the Jacksonville suburbs for grocery shopping.

Giving residents a closer-to-home choice was the driving force behind Baldwin getting into the grocery business in September 2019, a year after IGA pulled out of a 10,000 square foot building in the middle of Baldwin on Lima Street.

It was an unusual strategy. Other cities such as Jacksonville have used tax incentives to bring grocery stores into food deserts, the name for areas that lack access to affordable, healthy food.

The city of Jacksonville provided an $850,000 grant for Winn-Dixie to open a supermarket in Gateway Town Center in northwest Jacksonville in 2020. The city also worked with the Jacksonville Transportation Authority on a "door to store" program for people to book transportation to supermarkets outside their neighborhoods.

Baldwin was one of the few cities anywhere in the country that took that goal a step farther and actually ran its own grocery store. The employees of Baldwin Market are on the city's payroll and the town covers the store's day-to-day expenses.

The concept drew national media attention with coverage in The Washington Post and on Fox Business. But making it financially sustainable proved to be a high hurdle. Lynch said the Baldwin Town Council decided it wasn't possible to keep running losses in what he calls a very tough business.

The town had owned the Lima Street building for years, having built it with the aid of an economic development grant. Baldwin leased it to businesses for grocery stores, but those struggled to make it work financially. After IGA closed its Baldwin store in 2018, town leaders found that big retailers considered the building too small and mom-and-pop merchants saw it as too big.

That left residents in the lurch, particularly senior citizens who had a hard time getting access to supermarkets located miles away.

"The whole thing I wanted from the start, talking to the seniors, was to keep them in town so they didn't have to do all the driving and give them fresh produce, give them fresh meat and all the little items like frozen peas and stuff," Lynch said.

So the town decided to step in by investing $150,000 from a reserve account to get Baldwin Market up and running by hiring staff, stocking the shelves, and rehabbing the refrigeration system.

"It was a lot of work to get it going and to see that the idea is great, but the biggest problem we've had is our buying power," Lynch said.

He said chain stores that buy in bigger volumes could stock their inventory at far lower costs could, and that gap "has skyrocketed" since the 2021. That means Baldwin has to charge noticeably higher prices to recoup its cost on items like a box of macaroni than grocery chains do for the same products.

The town's bottom-line goal was never to generate extra income for the city, but it did want to at least break-even on Baldwin Market.

In the first full fiscal year of operation through the end of September 2020, the town's retail development fund, which covers Baldwin Market, took in about $1.04 million in revenue compared to $1.1 million in expenses, resulting in a $61,000 operating loss, according to the city's financial statements.

The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 helped generate sales that year because people were staying close to home in Baldwin and everywhere else.

"With lockdowns in place, the residents were very glad to have a local grocery store and this, in part, contributed to very robust sales," the audit firm that does the city's annual financial statement wrote in its report.

Those robust sales didn't last. In the next fiscal year through September 2021, revenue from sales dropped to about $826,000 while the city's cost of running the store came in at just over $1 million, resulting in a $178,000 shortfall, according to the financial statement.

For the year ending in September 2022, revenue dropped slightly to about $814,000 and the city trimmed costs to $985,000, but that still was a $171,000 shortfall.

Lynch said the gap between what it costs the town to run the store compared to the sales revenue has persisted.

"Once it starts costing the town more and more, the writing was on the wall with that," Lynch said. "You couldn't just keep going that way."

To tackle such food deserts, he said the federal government can help by providing subsidies for grocery stores in those areas. That would offset the disadvantage that standalone stores like Baldwin Market have in terms of buying power, Lynch said.

The growth of housing in the western side of Duval County will eventually create a market for new grocery stores in the Baldwin and Bryceville areas, but "the rooftops are not there yet," he said.

The store attracted a loyal following from inside and outside of Baldwin because of the quality and prices of its meats. "Best prices in town!" one shopper raved in a comment on the store's Facebook page about its cases of meat.

Lynch said Baldwin Market's meats was a product where the store could compete with national chains.

"We've been getting a good value on our meats, and the butcher we have is phenomenal," he said.

He hinted that even with the grocery store closing in March, there might be some food that remains available for purchase in the town.

"I'm working on something," he said. "Let's put it that way."

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Town-owned grocery store in Baldwin, Florida, will close in March