[The following final update was written by the organization and then sent to us for further sharing.]

Prosperity Market is a mobile farmers market and online marketplace featuring black farmers, food producers, and chefs. We travel throughout Los Angeles making it easy to support black-owned businesses while creating food access for often overlooked communities. Our mission is to transform our local ecosystem and our economy through agriculture, food access, nutrition education, and community partnerships.

With the support of the LA2050 grant, we were able to put in place key infrastructure and logistics that have prepared us for a successful and sustainable expansion in 2025 and beyond. This includes infrastructure to support our wholesale, distribution, and inventory management which broadens our supply chain, builds capacity, increases sales potential, and brings healthy food directly to vulnerable communities.

Throughout the grant cycle we onboarded 7 new vendors and have worked closely with our core roster of 27 black farmers, food producers, artisans, and chefs. As we expand our own operations, we must simultaneously help build the capacity of our vendors to meet demand. We’ve identified some of the challenges our vendors face to be marketing support, access to capital, access to commercial kitchen space, and retail opportunities. Many of our vendors are solo founders and find it difficult to balance the demands of business ownership alone. This insight has helped us create a comprehensive vendor membership program designed to alleviate these challenges and provide additional technical assistance, resources, and community to help our vendors grow and scale their businesses.

Our vendor membership program will go into full effect in 2025, however, we always provide intentional support and resources to our vendors. Throughout the grant period, we have provided product photo shoots and marketing support, press opportunities, inventory storage, retail opportunities, and resources for accessing capital.

Celia Sherman, of Sherman Produce told the LA Sentinel “Prosperity Market has been an opportunity for the small number of California’s Black farmers to provide much-needed healthy choices for diverse communities.” The article continues “Donald Sherman, owner of Sherman Produce Market in Fresno, said that Prosperity Market has given his business an introduction to an audience beyond the Central Valley.”

The LA Sentinel also spoke with Shaelle Etienne of Banane foods and wrote: As a small business owner, Etienne said she appreciates the commitment Prosperity Market has to its vendors. “Entrepreneurship can be a little discouraging sometimes,” she said. “Even just morally, it feels good to be part of a community that you know is sending you resources. Everybody is encouraged here to shop and to support us.

In April 2024, we secured a commercial kitchen which will act as a food hub and serve as our home base. We can now store inventory which makes the process to fulfill online orders more efficient, and sets us up to efficiently fulfill wholesale orders and stock our mobile trailer. We are also making the kitchen available for our vendors to produce and store their goods.

In June 2024, we built a brand new website which makes shopping our online marketplace much easier and more convenient. This, along with our new inventory storage capability allowed us to expand our online market hours. Customers can now shop at ProsperityMarketLA.com anytime and receive weekly delivery or shipping. We have been able to increase our online sales this year, and have served a total of 209 unique customers within the grant period. We are currently in the process of obtaining a POS system that will connect our online inventory with our commercial kitchen and mobile trailer.

We were able to support 75+ small businesses in addition to our core vendors between our flagship pop-up farmers markets in February and September. Each event saw 1500+ residents in attendance. In February 2024, Helpful Honda sponsored our Prosperity Bucks program, which was created to subsidize grocery costs for our customers. The first 100 attendees received $25 in Prosperity Bucks which could be redeemed with any vendor.

This grant enabled us to hire a kitchen manager to set up and maintain the kitchen, manage inventory, etc. We have also brought on a project manager who helps oversee special events, initiatives, and strategic partnerships.

This year, our market and initiatives have received over 40 media features including written press and coverage from KTLA, CBS, NBC, FOX, and Spectrum.

• KTLA Feb 2024 (in studio)
• KTLA Feb 2024 (on location at our market)
• CBS Feb 2024
• KTLA Aug 2024
• CBS Aug 2024
• NBC Aug 2024
• FOX Aug 2024
• Spectrum Aug 2024

While we were able to make significant progress internally this year, we have faced several challenges which have caused us to re-evaluate our timeline. We have had to reschedule the official launch of our mobile trailer to 2025 due to manufacturing delays. These delays are frustrating, however, we are taking full advantage of the additional time to make sure that we launch in a thoughtful and sustainable way. We have dedicated the extra time to more research, strategy, and planning for an impactful trailer launch.

With the trailer delay, we’ve had to push back our hiring timeline to coincide with trailer operations. While the trailer delay does mean that we won’t be bringing our mobile farmers market directly into our target neighborhoods this year, we have expanded our delivery radius to now accommodate 45 different zip codes throughout LA County.

We have also experienced unexpected setbacks in our process to become approved to accept CalFresh (SNAP/EBT). This has been a 2 year process due to our non-traditional business model. Now that we have a commercial kitchen, it does help move us forward in the process, however, there are additional requirements that are causing new delays. In response to these new challenges, we have decided to pursue SNAP/EBT approval for our online marketplace first, while continuing to navigate the approval process for our mobile trailer.

LA2050 has provided so much more than just funding. We’ve been able to connect with incredible organizations that are also part of the LA2050 network. The People’s Pottery Project joined us as a vendor at our last pop-up farmers market. LA2050’s support has helped us progress with our project, attracting even more funding and support from various organizations and council districts.

This year, we’ve been able to build our infrastructure and framework for the next phase of Prosperity Market, which we are excited to transition into in 2025. That will look like officially launching our mobile farmers market, implementing our new vendor membership program, expanding our wholesale services, and being approved to accept CalFresh (SNAP/EBT).

We will start the year celebrating our 4 year anniversary with a special pop-up farmers market that will feature our completed mobile trailer. From there, we will bring the trailer out for select events until our official launch tentatively in Q2 2025. We will begin operating the trailer on a weekly schedule, starting out 1 - 2 days per week, eventually growing to 3 - 4 days per week.

Beyond 2025, we look forward to having multiple Prosperity Market trailers service all of LA County and beyond.