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OFS opens first MetroMarket location in Illinois

By September 11, 2025October 6th, 2025MetroMarket, News

St. Louis Magazine reported on September 11, 2025

Operation Food Search will open first MetroMarket stop in Illinois

The St. Louis nonprofit’s trucks bring farmers market finds to food deserts.

A St. Louis program bringing fresh farmers market finds to food deserts will cross a big divide this Friday: the Mississippi River. That day, Operation Food Search’s MetroMarket will make its first official stop in Illinois thanks to a new partnership with the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Food, Agriculture, Nutrition Innovation Center in East St. Louis.

Operation Food Search COO Carlton Adams says the JJK FAN will become a regular stop for the organization’s rolling farmers markets.

“When their academy gets out on Friday evening, we’ll be there from 4 to 6 p.m. Parents are coming to pick up kids and those types of things. And even if you’re not there to pick up kids, you can shop on the MetroMarket.” – Carlton Adams

Operation Food Search has a series of regular stops (or markets, in their parlance) around town where its two MetroMarket trucks pull up at a regular time to sell fresh food. Prices are below cost to keep it less expensive than a traditional grocery store. SNAP cards are welcome, but so are customers who don’t qualify. “We’re not turning anyone away,” Adams says.

Adams acknowledges that he had once thought of roving options like MetroMarket as a stop-gap solution until full-service groceries would move in to serve the St. Louis region’s food deserts. But he’s now realizing they may have to be a more permanent way to approach the problem. As reporting by ProPublica has shown (using Cairo, Illinois, as an example), merely opening a grocery store in a desert doesn’t solve the problem, in part because larger chains benefit from pricing advantages that small outlets struggle to compete with—and there seems to be little appetite to enforce federal antitrust laws in a way that changes that. And as Kansas City has learned, even government subsidies aren’t enough. It poured millions into a grocery store, only to see it fail.

“I came into this believing that a program like MetroMarket was a bridge to when the P-and-L dynamics of not being able to function in the food deserts sorted themselves out through public-private partnerships and the like. I don’t see that anymore. I think that projects like this may be more a part of complex solutioning on a long-term basis than I would have thought before.” ~ Carlton Adams

For Operation Food Search, then, the JJK FAN stop seemed like a natural expansion. The nonprofit already has a partnership with the Danforth Center, which includes food being grown in East St. Louis by program participants. Some of that food will now be sold at the MetroMarket events.

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