Fountain Heights is about to get its first new grocery store in nearly 70 years. We All Eat Market opens Saturday, November 7, inside a new building called Heart of the Farm Market and Community Kitchen at 1201 16th St N, bringing fresh produce and everyday essentials back to a Birmingham neighborhood that has gone without a full grocery option for decades.
The opening comes courtesy of Fountain Heights Farms Cooperative, a Black-owned urban farm cooperative founded in 2016 by M. Dominique Villanueva and Christopher Gooden, according to Bham Now. November 7 marks a long-awaited return of a grocery store, and families and neighbors are invited to come celebrate, per the outlet's report. The cooperative describes its mission as nourishing community connections through food, health and healing.
We All Eat began life as a community supported agriculture delivery service connecting Birmingham-area households with fresh local produce, and it has since grown into something far more permanent. We All Eat Market will occupy the ground floor of Heart of the Farm, offering fresh produce, other fresh foods and everyday essentials, according to Fountain Heights Farms Cooperative. In a 2025 release, Villanueva described Fountain Heights as a neighborhood that hasn't seen a grocery store or market in nearly 70 years.
A Market Built to Serve Thousands
Heart of the Farm is designed to serve more than 3,000 people in and around Fountain Heights, and the building includes more than just shelves of groceries. The site also houses a community kitchen that will provide local food entrepreneurs with affordable commercial kitchen access, a feature the cooperative says can support food-based microbusinesses looking to store, prepare and sell their own goods, according to Bham Now's earlier coverage. The cooperative broke ground on the project in 2025 at the same 16th Street North address where the market now prepares to open.
The buildout is tied to a $150,000 agreement between the city of Birmingham and the cooperative, which the Birmingham City Council approved unanimously, according to the same reporting. We All Eat Market is an investment in Fountain Heights residents, neighborhood revitalization, local businesses and food access. The market will formally open with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Growing Beyond the Market's Walls
The grocery store sits atop a broader farming push. Fountain Heights Farms Cooperative has expanded to 16 neighborhood farm plots and has set a goal of reaching 119 farm plots by 2030, a target reported by the Birmingham Times. Earlier city planning documents tied to the project also referenced sustainable farming expansion with clean-water access across 10 farm lots, part of the cooperative's broader infrastructure goals ahead of the market's opening.
City officials have framed the project in terms of jobs and food production as well as retail access. Plans associated with the market and kitchen call for creating nine jobs paying at least $20 an hour and providing affordable commercial kitchen access to 60 food-based microbusinesses in the first year of operation, according to ABC 3340. The same plans set a goal of delivering an additional 25,000 pounds of nutritious, local food during the project's first year.
Birmingham's Broader Food Desert Problem
Fountain Heights' grocery gap is not an isolated case. Nearly 70% of Birmingham's population lives in food-desert areas, according to a 2019 report from the mayor's office cited by WBHM.
Running a grocery store in those conditions is notoriously difficult. Carver Jones Market owner James Harris told WBHM that grocery stores typically operate on profit margins of just 1% to 3%, even with help like the member-owned buying cooperative that secures volume discounts for his Titusville store. An earlier Carver Jones location in Fairfield closed in 2025 after being open about a year.
Those headwinds underscore what Fountain Heights is attempting with Heart of the Farm: pairing a grocery store with a cooperative farming network, a community kitchen and city backing in hopes of building something that lasts. For now, the neighborhood's focus is on November 7, when the doors open for the first time in nearly seven decades.
