Portland State Magazine Fall 2014

FALL 2014 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE 27 Pape approached Whole Foods and met with regional president Joe Rogoff. “He told me they loved what I was doing,” Pape says. “He said, ‘Make us a proposal.’” The net result was Pape and My Street Grocery coming under Whole Foods’ wing. The partnership has allowed Pape to hire helpers and to trade the old bread van for the eye-catching trolley, dubbed—what else?—Molly. The company hopes to shed its “Whole Paycheck” image and is working to open stores in low-income and blighted areas, including parts of Detroit and New Orleans. It recently introduced its own organic label aimed at being more price-competitive. The idea is to reach entirely different communities and neighborhoods than the ones traditionally associated with health food stores, says Julie Carter, the store team leader at the Whole Foods outlet in Portland’s Holly- wood district. Pape’s model “fits in really well with that,” Carter says. “It dovetails with what we do every day.” On a recent sunny afternoon, Molly the Trolley was parked on Southwest Couch Street, in part to serve clients of Central City Concern, an agency that helps homeless, addicted and unemployed residents. A woman pushing a stroller was delighted that she could buy a single banana for her toddler. Another customer—a regular—carefully filled two baskets with a variety of groceries without saying a word, before walking away at a slow, measured gait. Pape tells a brief story of the time two homeless customers who didn’t know each other were shopping at My Street and one asked whether the other wanted to have lunch. She later saw them eating together at a nearby park bench. That kind of connection, she says, speaks volumes. “It’s kind of self-serving,” Pape says of her job, “in that I get to feel good all the time.”  Harry Esteve is a staff member in the PSU Office of University Communications. Amelia Pape started My Street Grocery while a student and is now partnering with Whole Foods.