Elizabeth Abunaw has found her purpose in a career she never thought she would have. She recently opened her business, “Forty Acres Fresh Market,” in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood.
She told the Chicago Tribune, “I didn’t dream of becoming a grocer, I wanted to be an MTV DJ.”
“But I think a good business should solve a problem.”
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Forty Acres, an extension of Abunaw’s community-focused initiative, now provides fresh produce through home deliveries and pop-up markets. This new brick-and-mortar establishment stands as Chicago’s sole Black-owned grocery store, a fact Abunaw is keen to emphasize.
“Anyone can shop at Forty Acres, but make no mistake about it, I created this store as a Black woman for a Black neighborhood,” Abunaw said.
She specifically chose a name that meant something special to Black communities, nodding to “40 acres and a mule.” This phrase reminds people of the U.S. government’s broken promise to give land to formerly enslaved people after the Civil War, a decision that left Black Americans without land and pushed many into sharecropping. Over time, the phrase became a strong symbol of unfairness and missed chances. A local art student even designed the store’s logo, which features a mule.
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“Ultimately, the beginnings of food come from the earth. So the name Forty Acres is rooted in agriculture, which is the basis of food, and it is a very specific reference for a very specific people,” she said.
The New York native went to Cornell University and then spent ten years at General Mills before moving to Chicago. While there, she went to business school at Booth, and that’s when she started thinking about her grocery store, Forty Acres.
During her studies, Abunaw also worked for Microsoft and lived in the South Loop, where she noticed tons of grocery stores like Target, Trader Joe’s, and Jewel. But when she visited the Austin neighborhood, she needed cash and couldn’t find a bank. She tried to find a grocery store where she could buy something and get cash back, but there just weren’t any in the area.
“That’s when the ‘wheel started to turn’—something that I thought would be simple, wasn’t simple. What is this?” Abunaw said. “When I live in these predominantly white areas, I can find whatever I want, but now in a Black neighborhood, I can’t? It’s just harder.”
After being laid off from Microsoft, Abunaw revisited a concept she first explored in Austin in the fall of 2016. Leveraging her grocery expertise, she launched Forty Acres’ initial pop-up market in 2018 at the Sankofa Cultural Arts Center, bringing affordable fresh produce to the West Side.
“I always say, ‘When the only tool in your tool belt is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’ And the only tool in my tool belt seems to be grocery,” Abunaw laughed, joking that she came to Chicago “to get the (expletive) out of grocery.”
The building on Waller and Chicago Avenue took about five years to be converted into a grocery store after a Healthy Food Financing Initiative Grant kicked things off. Many factors delayed the opening, but between zoning issues, permits, designing, and redesigning, it wasn’t anything she hadn’t expected, Abunaw said. Some community members later assumed that city officials were delaying its opening.
“We bought the building in 2020, and like an idiot, I announced, ‘Oh, look at this building that we just got, in one year it’s gonna be a grocery store!’ When I posted that in November 2020, a year later, nothing had happened,” Abunaw said. “But there’s nothing the mayor or the alderman can do about the condition of this building.”
Construction began in late 2023. Forty Acres secured $750,000 from an Illinois program whose aim is to bring grocery stores in food deserts. Abunaw used the funds for operational costs like labor and inventory.
The building, a former Salvation Army center jointly bought by Abunaw and Westside Health Authority, required extensive renovations—including adding windows, reconfiguring entrances, opening walls, relocating the pump room, building a loading dock, and creating a landscape island—all necessitating permits.
“It took long because it took long,” she said with a laugh.
Forty Acres Fresh Market officially opened its doors on September 27 after a successful soft launch earlier in the month. This initial period allowed the team to refine operations and understand customer preferences.
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Abunaw stressed that the store’s main objective is to improve access to fresh, healthy food in an underserved area with limited choices. She noted that the goal is not to completely eliminate food insecurity in Austin or the West Side.
“Food insecurity is different than food access, and I think that people flip the two all the time,” she said. “I think that people exaggerate that Austin has no grocery stores; (people) not liking them is a different thing.”
Abunaw’s store prioritizes both food and nutrition access, featuring a dedicated nutrition corner near the checkout. This initiative, in collaboration with Foodsmart (a national tele-nutrition and foodcare platform), provides customers with nutrition guidance, seasonal recipe cards, access to registered dietitians, and information on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
“If customers don’t have SNAP, or they don’t know if they’re eligible, they can literally just walk two feet and come to us and learn,” said Ellie Logue, Foodsmart’s director of community engagement, who managed the nutrition corner’s build-out.
Forty Acres, according to Abunaw, is a business-driven initiative rather than an idealistic endeavor to “solve hunger.” She claimed to be filling a market void intensified by racial disparities among Chicago’s neighborhoods.
“If Forty Acres is successful, yes, there will be a social impact to it,” she said.
