Earlier this year, the Second Harvest Marketplace opened in Erie — a free grocery store designed to fight food insecurity with dignity at the center of the model. We were proud to provide the refrigeration, custom shelving, and design support behind it.
A new model for fighting food insecurity in Erie
In January 2026, the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest Pennsylvania opened the doors on something Erie hadn’t seen before: a free grocery store, operated as a food bank, where neighbors can shop for what they actually want to feed their families. Located inside the UPMC Health Plan Neighborhood Center at 803 East Avenue, the Second Harvest Marketplace looks and feels like a traditional grocery store. The fundamental difference is that everything in it is free.
The need it’s responding to is staggering. More than 12,500 children in Erie County — over 22% — experience food insecurity, meaning they lack consistent access to enough nutritious food. The Marketplace sits in the 16503 ZIP code, an area identified as one of Erie’s food deserts. In the months since opening, it has already served more than 848 households and 2,001 individuals on a recurring basis. That’s not a one-time outreach. That’s a community resource people are returning to as part of how they feed their families.
What makes the Marketplace meaningfully different from a traditional food bank model isn’t the food itself. It’s the experience of choosing it. Pre-packed boxes have been the dominant model in American food banking for decades, and they work — they’re efficient, they move volume, they reach a lot of people. But they also strip choice. A family receiving a box receives whatever is in the box. The Marketplace flips that. Neighbors arrive by appointment, are welcomed by staff and volunteers, and shop the aisles themselves — selecting fresh produce, frozen meat, dairy, eggs, pantry staples, prepared meals, and household essentials based on what their family will actually eat.
“The Marketplace is more than just distributing food. It’s about creating a welcoming, dignified experience where our neighbors feel supported and valued.”
— Gregory D. Hall, CEO, Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest Pennsylvania
What dignity-centered food access actually requires
A shift in model is a shift in infrastructure. A traditional food bank operates as a warehouse: pallets in, pallets out, large-scale walk-in coolers and freezers, industrial shelving optimized for bulk storage and rapid distribution. A marketplace-style food bank has to do all of that and function as a customer-facing grocery store. That’s a meaningfully different design problem.
When you walk into a grocery store you’ve shopped in a hundred times, you don’t think about the equipment. You don’t notice that the produce section is at a specific humidity to keep the lettuce crisp, or that the dairy case is sized for the volume the store moves on a peak Saturday, or that the shelving allows for clear sight lines so customers can find what they need without staff intervention. You don’t think about it because it works. That’s the point.
The Marketplace had to deliver that same invisible reliability — but in a context where the customers are families experiencing food insecurity, the budget is grant-funded, the space is shared with a community health center, and the operation needs to balance traditional food-bank logistics with grocery-store-style merchandising. The shelving has to invite, not warehouse. The refrigeration has to display, not just store. The flow has to welcome.
That’s the work HRI was honored to do.
HRI’s role in the project
Our scope on the Second Harvest Marketplace included three connected pieces of the build:
Refrigeration equipment
The Marketplace stocks fresh produce, frozen meat, dairy, eggs, and prepared meals — all of which require properly specified refrigeration to be stored safely and displayed accessibly. The right equipment, sized for the volume the Marketplace moves and engineered for the long service life a community resource requires, is the foundation that the entire fresh-food side of the operation depends on.
Custom shelving
Off-the-shelf grocery shelving wasn’t the right fit for the Marketplace’s specific footprint and merchandising approach. Custom shelving lets the space be laid out for clear navigation, appropriate sight lines, and the right balance between dry storage capacity and customer-facing display — supporting the shopping experience the Marketplace was designed to create.
Design support
Designing a hybrid food-bank-and-grocery-store within an existing community health center is the kind of project where the right design support up front pays off for years. Working closely with the Second Harvest team, we helped shape how the space would flow, how the equipment and shelving would work together, and how the operation could be both efficient for staff and welcoming for the neighbors it serves.
Why this project matters to us
HRI has been designing commercial kitchens across the region since 1999. We work with country clubs, restaurants, hotels, schools, and healthcare facilities — operators of every scale, with budgets and concepts that vary widely. The Second Harvest Marketplace is something different.
When you spend decades in the commercial food service industry, you develop a clear sense of what good infrastructure makes possible. A well-designed kitchen makes a chef’s job easier. A well-designed dishroom makes a service night smoother. A well-designed refrigeration package keeps a restaurant’s food costs in line. Those are real outcomes, and we take them seriously.
A well-designed marketplace, in this specific context, makes it possible for a family in Erie to walk in, choose food that meets their actual needs, and leave with the dignity of having shopped — not the experience of having been handed a box. That’s a different kind of outcome, and being asked to be part of it is a different kind of privilege.
We’re grateful to the Second Harvest team for trusting us with the project, and we have enormous respect for the work they do every day — not just in the Marketplace, but across the eleven counties of Northwest Pennsylvania they serve. If you’re in a position to support that work, the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest Pennsylvania welcomes donations, volunteers, and community partnerships at nwpafoodbank.org.
For other nonprofits considering a similar model
The Marketplace model is gaining traction across the country, and we expect to see more food banks across the region exploring whether a shopping-style operation could work in their community. If your organization is thinking about a similar project, a few notes from our experience on this one:
- Plan the refrigeration around your real menu of fresh foods. A marketplace that wants to offer fresh produce, frozen proteins, and dairy needs meaningfully different refrigeration than a warehouse-only operation. Size for the inventory you actually want to display, not just store.
- Custom shelving is often the right call. Off-the-shelf shelving works for warehouses. For a customer-facing space with a specific footprint, custom shelving lets you optimize the flow, sight lines, and capacity for the operation you’re actually running.
- Bring in design support before you finalize the space. Hybrid models — community center plus food bank, food bank plus grocery store — have constraints that don’t show up until you start laying out the flow. A design conversation early saves real money and real headaches later.
- Think about long-term service. Community-funded projects can’t afford to lose equipment to early failure. Reliability and serviceability matter more than they would in a commercial setting, because a food bank doesn’t have the operational margin to absorb downtime.
If your nonprofit is exploring a similar build and would like to talk through what’s involved, we’re always happy to have that conversation — whether it leads to a project together or just helps you ask better questions of whoever you ultimately work with.
Doing meaningful work, together.
HRI has been designing commercial food service infrastructure across Erie and the broader region since 1999. For nonprofits, schools, and community-serving organizations planning a build, reach out — we’d like to be part of it.
