LRB in the News

East of downtown Houston is a neighborhood seeing big changes. This is the Little Red Box Grocery Store.

A tiny grocery store in the heart of Houston's East End is the latest effort to address so-called food deserts across the city. Little Red Box Grocery is a labor of love for one man who wants to make good food more accessible.

Popston joins other food and beverage tenants such as Cafe Louie, Little Red Box Grocery and How to Survive on Land and Sea at The Plant, a 20,000-square-foot mixed-use redevelopment owned by Houston-based Concept Neighborhood.

The Little Red Box Grocery aims to combat the neighborhood's status as a food desert — an area that's designed by the USDA as having less access to healthy food and more access to unhealthy food — with fresh ingredients, meal kits, and pantry staples. Shoppers will find everything from fresh produce and cereal to dairy items and more on its shelves. Recently, the store started accepting SNAP/EBT (food stamps), which is critical in a neighborhood with a median household income of under $31,000, according to a release.

Eschewing the big-box model, Little Red Box Grocery has opened in Second Ward, offering fresh groceries and pantry staples in a USDA-identified food desert.

Samuel Newman founded Little Red Box Grocery in June 2019 to eradicate food deserts in the Galveston and Houston areas, using a curbside model to sell a variety of pantry items plus meal kits, produce, baked goods, frozen foods, dairy, meat, and seafood.