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Newstrack: Nonprofit Cedar Rapids grocery store continues effort to become self-sustaining
Viral Facebook post, new parking lot help bring in more customers, but Matthew 25 looking for ways to keep people coming to Cultivate Hope Corner Store year-round
Jan. 11, 2026 6:00 am
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CEDAR RAPIDS — A nonprofit grocery store in Cedar Rapids is continuing to look for ways to bring in more customers from around the city, in order to keep providing healthy food options to a neighborhood that otherwise wouldn’t have any.
Background
Matthew 25, a Cedar Rapids nonprofit, opened the Cultivate Hope corner store at 604 Ellis Blvd. NW in 2022. The goal was to create a source of healthy food in the Time Check neighborhood, which previously was classified as a “food desert,” or a neighborhood where food is not easily accessible within walking distance — a problem exacerbated by the fact many people living in the area don’t have reliable transportation.
The store has become an important staple in the neighborhood in the last few years. Beyond being the main place where most neighbors buy their groceries, it also is a social hub where adults and kids can gather. The store includes a small space with open tables and chairs — called the Hadley Hangout — where people can sit to eat the ready-made lunches available at the store, or simply to socialize with their neighbors.
“A lot of kids in the neighborhood walk right by here on their way to and from school,” store manager Sarah Nekola said. “There are quite a few kids who have made this their safe space after school. It’s a spot where they can stop and hang out, do their homework, and with our free produce corner, they can grab a snack.”
The free produce corner — a small section of the store that functions like a food pantry, with free fresh produce available to whoever needs it — also has served to bring community members together.
According to Nekola, area residents love to bring the overflow veggies from their gardens to donate to the pantry, as an easy way to share produce between neighbors. In the winter, when fewer vegetables are being donated, the corner is stocked using nonprofit funds — usually about $500 a week.
The nonprofit opened the store using grants and donations, with the hope that it would eventually become self-sustaining. That goal was starting to seem out of reach before a Facebook post the store made last July attracted a lot of attention, and the store saw a huge increase in customers.
“It takes a village to keep an independent grocery store going. That’s what keeps our shelves full and our mission strong,” the post read, asking community members in and out of the Time Check neighborhood to try to make the corner store part of their regular grocery shopping plan.
The post quickly became the most popular on the store’s page. It spurred a noticeable increase in foot traffic, and questions from community members outside the Time Check neighborhood about when the parking lot being built next to the store would be finished so they could stop by more easily.
“I had quite a few conversations with new customers coming in, who talked about how they’ve always driven by here, and they always wanted to stop and check it out, but there was nowhere to park,” Nekola said. “I even had people driving from outside of Cedar Rapids to stop in … who said they used to live in the neighborhood and they wanted to come check it out, because they just thought it was wonderful that we put a grocery store here.”
What’s happened since
About a month after the Facebook post increased customer numbers, the store got another surge of foot traffic when the parking lot was finally finished, prompting more media coverage. The increased foot traffic stuck around for a few months, giving the nonprofit hope that the store was on its way to becoming fully self-sustaining, rather than continuing to rely on donors.
“The numbers we were hitting in September and October were the level we need to be at all the time, so we’re not that far off,” said Jana Bodensteiner, chief development officer for Matthew 25. “If we can get the interest in the store so people come as consistently as they were coming in September and October, this will work. That will get us to that self-sustaining point. We just need that year-round.”
But the numbers dropped again in November and December as the hype died down and customers turned to larger stores to fulfill all their holiday shopping needs in one place. In response, the nonprofit is working on some new initiatives to try to compete with larger stores for customer attention, including a plan to offer holiday packages next year to try to keep November and December sales numbers up.
The store also is developing an online ordering system that will allow for curbside grocery pickup, which is popular among shoppers at larger grocery stores. That system should be up and running sometime in the next six months, according to Bodensteiner.
The main draw of the corner store over larger grocers, though, is the nonprofit’s efforts to keep prices low, especially for common household items, Bodensteiner and Nekola said.
“One of our new initiatives is something called ‘staple items,’ so the idea is that we wanted to keep those staple items that every household needs at an affordable price, and we want to make sure they’re reliably stocked,” Nekola said. “We’ve got produce, protein, carbs, even things like toilet paper and soap, and they’re all marked with our special blue tags … so that way people know you can grab that, and it’s going to be a super affordable price, and it’s going to stay that way consistently.”
The store also offers hot lunch specials and some premade dinner options at low prices — all for $6 or less — to encourage people to pick up something healthy on the days they don’t have time or energy to cook for themselves, instead of stopping for fast food.
Some of the other items in the store, such as locally made specialty goods, are a little more expensive and are popular among some of the store’s donors who also shop there, according to Bodensteiner. Those pricier items can help to subsidize the low prices for staple items, but Bodensteiner said the easiest way for the store to keep staple prices low is by continuing to increase its buying power, which it can only do with a greater volume of customers.
“If running a small grocery store was profitable, everyone would be doing it, and they’re not doing it,” Bodensteiner said. “We don’t have the purchasing volume the way the bigger stores do, so the prices we’re paying for all the items in the store, I guarantee, are higher than what other grocery stores are paying, and we’re doing the absolute best we can to try not to pass that increase in price on to our customers.”
Comments: (319) 398-8328; emily.andersen@thegazette.com
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