LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- A new business in Louisville's Smoketown neighborhood is hoping to fill a need in the community, butt the owners said not all aspects of the business model are meeting expectations. 

Locals Food Hub and Pizza Pub, at 822 E. Broadway, is a newly opened pizza pub restaurant combined with a small, local grocery. Co-owner Birch Bragg started the business in Frankfort in 2021. 

"About two and a half years ago, we identified Louisville as a place where we would like to expand for a second location for Locals Food Hub," Bragg said.

He said he believes Louisville has the most need for an urban environment for "real access" to fresh, local, nutrient-dense foods. The Smoketown location opened this October. 

"We intentionally target areas like Smoketown that need our services immediately to be able to walk to fresh grocery access in a food desert," Bragg said. "But, in so doing, that's another cost we absorb. By trying to do the right thing and put ourselves in the right place, we're also taking ourselves off the beaten path." 

Bragg said while the grocery part of the business model has been well-received, the restaurant side has been "significantly under-preforming" the Frankfort location. 

"... We didn't really expect that," he said. 

Bragg called the restaurant the "cash flow" piece of the operation, saying it enables the rest of the concept. The grocery side accepts SNAP benefits and participates in Kentucky Double Dollars.

"If someone walks in and spends $20 on their SNAP card, they can walk out with $40 in local groceries," Bragg said. 

He said with a recent $2,000 donation from the Lesley and Rhyan Prather Foundation, those Double Dollars are actually being turned into "triple" dollars, allowing someone to spend $20 and actually get $60 worth of local groceries. 

Bragg said margins are "super tight" on the grocery side, but it's where the Locals mission is focused. 

"This is where our heart lies," he said. "This is where our mission is, this is where we conduct all our food access programs and this is really the heart and soul of the store."

"When you take a look at the concept, I love the concept of food from Kentucky," said John Zoeller, a customer eating at the restaurant Tuesday afternoon. 

Another table in the pizza pub was filled with a group holding its a meeting from the University of Louisville Family Business Center. 

"I've been into the (grocery) store part and the restaurant before, and so, when I saw they had the private room, I thought this would be a great place for our group to meet," Andrea Strange said.

Jonathan Taylor, who works nearby, said he enjoys the new access to not only the restaurant, but also the grocery part of the business.

"Just being in this little area, there's a lot of food around," he said. "But you have to get in a car and drive and fight parking and everything. So it was kind of cool to have some places open up where I could walk over there on my lunch break."

But Taylor said he thinks spreading the word could help. 

"I knew nothing about it other than I drove past it on my way into work and was like, 'Oh, I haven't seen that there,'" he said. 

Bragg said the city has been great to work with but he'd love to see more resources put into the area. 

"If they could paint the sidewalks, if they could put some more lighting between here and Paristown Point and all the way down to Breckenridge ..." he said, "... As a small business owner who's willing to go in first and invest in these areas, all we ask from Metro — from all the different areas, from all the different departments — is that they do everything they can to help make this area feel more vibrant, to make it feel like someone's here ..."  

This isn't the first time there's been a push for a grocery store in the Smoketown neighborhood. 

In 2022, Louisville Association for Community Economics Inc. (LACE) and its partner, Louisville Community Grocery, announced its plans to once again try and build a store in Smoketown. The co-op grocery store was going to be located at Finzer and South Jackson streets on a currently empty lot donated by the Hillerich family of Louisville Slugger.

But in September, LACE board member Cassia Herron shared the partnership between LACE and Louisville Community Grocery ended, in turn killing the current plans.

The project was also backed by a $3.5 million bond from Metro Government. In 2020, Metro Government set the money aside to award to a grocery store project in Louisville's high-needs area. LACE was awarded the bid when the city's first request for proposals (RFP) were put out in 2021. But, the city ended talks in the beginning of 2022. 

It re-awarded the money later in 2022. Officials previously said Smoketown is the right location for the grocery because it's a food desert, meaning most residents live more than 1 mile from the nearest supermarket.

Locals Food Hub and Pizza Pub is open daily. It's expansion to Louisville comes in large part from a federal grant through the USDA.

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