Olympia Auset’s route to opening a health food emporium in one of the food deserts of Los Angeles started with her own trips to the grocery store.
It was 16 years ago. Auset was fresh out of college and living on a vegan diet. Her neighborhood largely lacked healthful options, and she wound up commuting two hours round-trip by bus to buy nutritious food that fit her budget as a recipient of federal food aid.
“You spend all of this time on the bus, get somewhere that has healthy food and then you’re having to debate with yourself: Can I afford this apple?” Auset recalled.
From those demoralizing trips across town, Auset went on to found Süprmarkt, a nonprofit organic produce business on Slauson Avenue in South L.A. that started as a street pop-up in 2016 and grew into a storefront grocery in 2024 thanks in large part to a community crowdfunding campaign.
The inequity in access to healthful food spans the whole county but hurts its poorest residents and communities of color the most, researchers at USC found in a study last year.
Some 25% of Los Angeles County residents don’t consistently know they’ll have enough food, and even more, 29%, lack access to nutritious foods that can help prevent heart disease, diabetes and obesity. Roughly 30% of Black and Latino residents, who make up the majority of South L.A., have trouble finding healthful food.
Among recipients of federal food assistance through this state’s CalFresh program, 39% don’t have food security and 45% don’t have nutrition security.
This in a state that grows nearly half of the nation’s vegetables and three-quarters of its fruits and nuts, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
For Auset, this increasingly seemed like more of an injustice than an inconvenience. With just $300 and help from loved ones when she started out, Auset purchased enough produce to load up the back of a friend’s Suzuki and sold it at Leimert Park and other locations around South L.A.
“The first time we came out there, we pretty much sold out of everything and people just expressed so much gratitude,” Auset recalled. “It was crazy, hearing from people who were 40 and 50 years old who were like, ‘I don’t have this in my neighborhood.’”
Since opening, Auset has offered special discounts to customers receiving monthly food assistance, most recently during the November delay in federal SNAP disbursements. As thousands of low-income Angelenos lined up at food banks, Auset started the SNAP Back program, matching 125 donors with customers who receive food aid, enabling them to purchase food at the store.
But it’s not just those who are most vulnerable during delays or cuts in federal aid who are at risk, said Kayla de la Haye, director of USC’s Institute for Food System Equity.
“It’s also a lot of folks who are just low-income, or even middle-income, who are really struggling to make their budget work,” said De la Haye, whose team authored the food and nutrition study.
Food insecurity rates are consistently two or three times worse for Black and Latino Angelenos than for white residents, she said.
For Auset, the insidious thing about food and nutrition insecurity is how they can start to feel like facts of life.
“That’s something that was normalized for me growing up” in L.A., she said. “It was always, ‘You’ve got to go to the white neighborhood for that. … I knew something was wrong, but I never thought about the underlying reasons.”
The first seeds of this growing awareness were planted while she was studying at Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, D.C.
She learned about Will Allen, the former professional basketball player who went on to become a leader in urban farming and food policy after purchasing the last remaining farm in Milwaukee and selling produce he harvested to underserved communities.
“Something kind of clicked,” Auset said. “We have the ability to feed everyone. We just don’t.”
But if searching for healthful food in South L.A. was a challenge, navigating bureaucracies and food distributors as a young Black female entrepreneur was even more daunting.
There was an inspector who, after surveying the building’s remodeling progress, asked, “Is this your husband’s project?”
A vegan ice cream distributor sounded incredulous when learning that Auset wanted to sell the items in her part of town.
“He was like, ‘Vegan ice cream on Slauson?’” Auset recalled. “He just laughed me off the phone — and he never sent me the price list.”
One supplier agreed to sell to Auset, then refused to deliver to a neighborhood it considered too dangerous for its drivers.
Driving west past Crenshaw Boulevard along the section of Slauson where Süprmarkt is located, auto repair shops and fast food restaurants dominate the scene.
Then comes a freshly painted, black-and-white, Craftsman-style bungalow with its towering “Süprmarkt” street sign. Auset said the location is meaningful to her because the late rapper and entrepreneur Nipsey Hussle, whose community-minded approach to business she admired, operated his clothing store, the Marathon, just down the street.
At Süprmarkt, sunny positivity and Black consciousness prevail, a carryover from the building’s former life as home to Mr. Wisdom, a health-conscious shop.
Patio furniture and a planter box bursting with fresh herbs, wildflowers and cherry tomatoes greet customers on a wooden deck at the entrance, along with a cabinet resting on a post that contains a tiny library of Afrocentric books.
Celebrating the beauty of Black culture and Black people is important when promoting wellness in the community, Auset said.
That mind-set also infuses the interior, where a wall of glazed tiles tinted in rich teal sets the mood. Some are painted with images of what Auset calls “ancestors” — among them singer Nina Simone and activist Fred Hampton. R&B music is playing. Frankincense fills the air.
Displays of fruits and vegetables, as well as vegan, nutrient-rich dry goods and snacks, anchor the small space. In a separate room, Auset has self-serve bins of bulk beans and grains. She just expanded with a juice bar in the rear of the store.
The backyard “learning garden” is a work in progress, but Auset shows off a collection of greens and herbs and says she plans to host farming and holistic health workshops there.
Hannibal Ali, a physical trainer, came in for fruit and vegetables for his raw food diet. He shops here because of the convenient location, he said, but as a fellow Black Angeleno, it goes deeper.
“We don’t have a lot of access to healthy food,” said Ali, who also volunteers at the nearby Park Hill community garden. “If we don’t support ourselves, who’s going to support us? Self-preservation is a very important thing in our community.”
Dérly Barajas lives five doors down from Süprmarkt and comes in every few days to pick up items for his own raw-food diet.
Barajas, an educator who works with adults who have special needs, said that before the market opened, he too resorted to busing out of the neighborhood to buy groceries.
He describes the store as a blessing. For two years, Barajas has been battling a mysterious illness that causes fainting spells and pressure in his head and chest. Thinking the illness might be connected to his diet, he cut out fast food and sugary, ultra-processed snacks.
He surprised himself recently by purchasing some barbecue jackfruit that looked just like the meat for a sloppy Joe.
Part of the charm of the store, he said, is that it introduces customers to a new way of thinking about ingredients, food preparation and what it means to care for your body.
“If somebody decides that they want to eat well,” Auset likes to say, “that should not be a luxury.”
That said, she added, shopping for your health can still feel special.
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