Doug Rauch was contemplating the proper arrangement of lettuce.
Earlier this winter, the longtime grocery store executive was just hours away from opening his new Daily Table grocery store in Roxbury, patiently watching his employees fiddle with the shelves until the packages of leafy greens glimmered like emeralds under the refrigerator lights.
The Dudley Square store is the second for Daily Table, a nonprofit designed to bring healthy, affordable food to inner-city neighborhoods with limited grocery options. With 2 1/2 years of hard-earned experience from the first outlet in Dorchester, Rauch believes he has amended his original business plan with the hopes of eventually launching Daily Table stores across the country.
“We’ve had to get creative,’’ he said.
Daily Table doesn’t look like a typical supermarket; It is smaller and laid out more like a Trader Joe’s, where Rauch was president for 14 years. In 2013, Rauch went on a national media tour to explain his mission: a store that would stock food that had passed its sell-by date, salvaging still perfectly good food from the landfill and getting it to people who need it.
Some hailed the idea as a breakthrough. Others worried that selling expired food to poor people was demeaning. But Rauch argued that he could create a sustainable business model that could to solve food waste and hunger at the same time.
He had no idea how hard it would be.
Before the first store in Codman Square even opened in 2015, the Boston Public Health Commission nearly derailed the entire effort when it deemed it illegal to sell food past its sell-by date. So instead of getting donations, Daily Table now buys the bulk of its food directly from over 65 suppliers, intercepting shipments that would expire soon after they hit shelves. It then sells the items at cost or for pennies on the dollar.
Touring the new store, Rauch pointed proudly: Those salad cartons and 16 ounce Chobani yogurts were both 99 cents, and cans of tuna cost 69 cents each (“It’s cheaper than Costco!’’ he said).
But sourcing food wasn’t the only issue: Early sales revealed the Daily Table’s low-income customers didn’t just want ingredients, but were looking for prepared meals. “If they’re getting off the bus at 6:30 or 7 p.m.,’’ Rauch said, “they’re not cooking for an hour.’’
So Rauch built a kitchen inside the Dorchester store, hired a head chef, Ismail Samad, and a team of cooks who follow strict nutritional guidelines. The challenge, Rauch said, was creating recipes that compete in both price and flavor with the KFC across the street.
It was a difficult start. For a while, the entire operation felt like an episode of “Chopped’’ as Samad had no idea what would be coming off the trucks each day. “How do you create a system around uncertainty?’’ Samad said. He’d triage whatever would arrive, picking through bruised produce, stocking things in freezers, and prepping meals to be purchased that day.
The store typically had 100 customers daily at the start; today it’s about 450. As the economics shifted, the kitchen’s mission did as well and it became more important to consistently have food on hand. Workers now spend less time gleaning “ugly’’ food that might be tossed, Samad said. “We can’t afford to be as intentionally inconsistent.’’
There were other surprises. While Daily Table’s goal was to serve people who use financial assistance programs like WIC and SNAP, the store learned shoppers were choosing to spend their aid dollars elsewhere to buy things like oils and spices.
“That’s part of our challenge going forward, to not only being a force on the affordable nutrition front, but making it a place where people can reliably go to do to their shopping,’’ said Michael Malmberg, who worked with Amazon’s operations team before becoming the Daily Table’s chief operating officer last year.
Perhaps one of the biggest hurdles, and one that Rauch anticipated, was getting people to actually walk through the doors. The signage is explicit: Billboards tout “EVERYONE IS WELCOME.’’ And he used a “treasure hunt’’ approach he’d honed at Trader Joe’s to expand his audience, hooking people with Whole Foods-quality products at a fraction of the price. Today, the clientele reflects the neighborhood’s shifting demographic, with families new to Dorchester stocking their carts alongside older ladies wandering in from the church across the street.
Rauch says the stores offer his needy customers a sense of dignity. “The truth of the matter is the community likes seeing everyone shop there, particularly if they know you could go elsewhere,’’ he said.
He can point to other successes: The average basket size has nearly doubled. Daily Table now offers free cooking classes in Dorchester. And the focus on health and nutrition is changing lives.
“One of the first customers I met said that since the Daily Table opened, he has lost 75 pounds and is off his diabetic meds,’’ said Marvin Clark, who now manages the Roxbury store. Another said her SNAP dollars used to run out in 10 days, but can now last throughout the month.
Still, many haven’t lost sight of the fact that the problems set out in Rauch’s original mission still exist.
Sell-by dates result in over 160 billion pounds of healthy food that’s discarded each year, said Emily Broad Leib, director of Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, who has worked with Rauch to push for national changes to the regulations.
“As a result of that basic fact, they can’t do what they set out to do, and that’s to fix that space between expiration date and usable date, ultimately they’re stuck competing with a regular grocery store,’’ said William Masters, an economist at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. “It’s really tragic about an insight and an opportunity that is still there.’’
But Rauch is soldiering on. “We have first-rate, first-class product,’’ he said, “at a TJ Maxx of food sort of price.’’
Janelle Nanos can be reached at janelle.nanos@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @janellenanos.
