At a Nov. 20 board meeting, Invest Atlanta unveiled a four-part plan to bring fresh, affordable food within 0.5 miles to all Atlantans by 2030 – including opening a second Azalea Fresh Market location this year.
The city's economic agency has been working on the food access plan since 2022. First, she had to assess the current food landscape. The mapping showed that there was a lack of grocers in the south and west of the city.
Mayor Andre Dickens had set a goal of getting Atlanta residents within a half-mile of fresh food, but Eloisa Klementich, president and CEO of Invest Atlanta, knew it would be a challenge.
“We are clear that no single solution will be decisive,” said Klementich. “We need everyone and every kind of effort to be successful, and every community has a different approach and need.”
Invest Atlanta's four pillars of food access strategy aims to address all of these approaches. The main plans are to advance political systems, support innovative models of food access, maintain and improve existing stores and attract more large supermarkets to the city.
To date, the economic development agency has invested about $54 million in food access projects through grants to support existing grocers and incentives to large supermarkets.
The center of Invest Atlanta's food access efforts is the recently opened Azalea Fresh Market downtown. It is Atlanta's first urban grocery store and the first grocery store in downtown Atlanta since 2005.
The two-story store offers a variety of fresh foods. Invest Atlanta and the city funded construction, while local grocer Savi Provisions owns and operates the space.
Klementich said Azalea Fresh Market was the most popular story Invest Atlanta had ever published, and it even caught the attention of New York City, where Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani pushed for city grocery stores to keep prices low.
“The reason they call is because we impact people’s lives,” Klementich said.
She further announced Azalea Market's second location, opening along Campbellton Road in early 2026. Klementich said Invest Atlanta also plans to “continue to expand” branch locations.
The CEO said Invest Atlanta eventually hopes to consolidate distribution centers to reduce transportation costs and keep store prices low. As the agency and the city move into what they call the next phase of food access, officials say they want to keep the process transparent.
Invest Atlanta launched the Food Access Dashboard to monitor the city's progress on its four-pillar strategy. A group from the Georgia Institute of Technology helped build the forward-facing website.
“This will be a publicly accessible dashboard that people in this community and then across the country can see to see our progress,” said Mayor Andre Dickens. “To know where our successes lie, but also where our challenges lie.”
The mayor continued: “We have set a goal, we have paved a path to that goal.”
Dickens said Invest Atlanta has so far funded new grocery equipment, helped attract new chains, expanded tax and construction incentives and worked with the Independent Grocers Alliance to “really get to the bottom of this problem.”
“We've gone from, 'Oh, there's a problem,' which existed before many of us were in leadership, to the ability to try to fix that problem,” Dickens said.