It's been decades since Old Town had a grocery store. Old town was once home to numerous family-owned markets. Fong Chong, the last of them, switched to being a restaurant in 1979. Nothing has fully replaced it since — a 2021 business stimulus strategy for the district, prepared by ECONorthwest for Prosper Portland, still listed a small grocery store among the amenities the neighborhood needed most. In one of Portland's densest neighborhoods, home to many of the organizations serving our city's most vulnerable residents, getting fresh food has meant a walk to the Pearl District Whole Foods or a trek to a Safeway about a mile away.

But that’s changing. By the end of 2026, Old Town will have its own grocery store — and it's not being built by an out-of-state chain focused on shareholder dividends, but by a nonprofit organization that's put down roots in the neighborhood and has spent the past decade feeding it in every other way it could. Feed the Mass, the nonprofit behind this new store, isn't waiting for someone else to invest in Old Town. It's building the foundations of a more livable community itself.

Jacob Valentine is the founder and executive director of Feed the Mass. In early September, he took me on a tour of the organization's new headquarters in the heart of Old Town. The ground floor he's walking me through will be home to 1st & Nourish Market. It's inside the Nourish Building, Feed the Mass's five-story home at 80 NW Davis St. in Old Town, housed in the historic Blagen Block — formerly home to Airbnb’s Portland operations. The building already does a lot at once — a commercial kitchen turning out 7,000 meals a week, a co-working space, a coffee shop, a bookstore — and by the end of this year, if permitting cooperates, it’ll also house a full grocery store..

Valentine points out what each corner will become as we walk. A peaked, house-shaped nook — left over from the previous tenant — will hold bulk goods: grains, beans, flours, spices, scooped and weighed to order. A wall nearby is earmarked for locally made packaged goods. Another will be lined with coolers of ready-to-heat frozen meals made in Feed the Mass's own kitchen. Fresh, locally sourced produce gets its own section near the front. The space will feature brick walls, a green tiled checkout counter, crates of produce and shelves of bulk goods filling the space. This isn't going to look or feel like your average discount grocery store, and that's deliberate.

Feed the Mass isn't running this like a typical grocery business. 

"We're not going to be a boutique that has filet mignon," Valentine said. "We're going to have carrots and vegetables, we're going to have frozen meals, we're going to be giving away a lot of food. If we give away half and we sell the other half," Valentine said, "it's a win. As long as our community is being fed."

That math only works because the grocery store isn't the whole organization — it's an extension of one that's been operating for nearly a decade. Valentine started Feed the Mass in 2016 to teach kids how to cook. When the pandemic hit, he laid himself off in February 2020, watched everything shut down by May, and started making meals with the last $500 the organization had: 150 meals the first week, funded by donations that hit $5,000 almost immediately. The City of Portland took notice and brought the organization on to run food service for its Safe Rest Villages. 

Today Feed the Mass makes about 7,000 meals a week, spending somewhere between $800,000 and $1 million a year on food. Buying at that scale changed what a meal costs to make: per-meal food costs have dropped from roughly $3 in the early days to somewhere between $1.25 and $1.80 now, purely on the strength of buying power, Valentine said. That's the same buying power 1st & Nourish Market is built to extend outward — to local producers who can sell in volume without opening their own storefront, and to shoppers who benefit from prices set by an organization that isn't trying to turn a profit on carrots in the first place.

Feed the Mass bought the Blagen Block building outright with financing help from Oregon Pacific Bank and Business Oregon's Credit Enhancement Fund. The bet wasn't on the easiest place to grow. It was specifically Old Town.

"Old Town is where we planted roots," Valentine said. "We bought a building, we've been here for the last five years. It is important to us that Old Town has that regeneration." 

He points to a neighborhood already shifting under its own momentum — a growing cluster of nonprofits focused on connecting people to services rather than pushing them along, and new tenants like a coffee shop and a bookstore now sharing the Nourish Building with Feed the Mass. A grocery store that people have a reason to visit weekly, Valentine argues, does something a service drop-in can't: it puts regular foot traffic — families, downtown workers, students, neighbors — back on the sidewalk in front of it.

Feed the Mass is also structurally different from the businesses that used to occupy storefronts like this one, and Valentine is direct about why that matters for what the store can be. There are no shareholders expecting a return, and grocery margins are notoriously thin even for retailers built to chase them. Rent on the building is covered by co-working tenants; the store itself just needs to keep the lights on. Anyone who wants to support it beyond shopping there — a sponsorship, a donation, a partnership supplying product — gets something Valentine says a lot of nonprofits fail to offer: a monthly accounting of exactly where the money went, meals served and all, "even," he said, "if we lost money this month in the grocery store, and that's okay."

Permitting is the last hurdle before three of the space's interior walls — none of them load-bearing, in a building Valentine describes as having "good bones" — come down to make room for shelving, coolers, and the produce cases pictured in the renderings. Construction is expected to take about three months once demo starts, putting an opening at the end of this year within reach, permitting delays notwithstanding.

When it opens, 1st & Nourish Market will run four days a week to start — Wednesday through Saturday — with hours adjusted based on demand. EBT will be accepted, and Valentine wants online ordering and delivery through services like DoorDash in place early, so the store isn't only reachable on foot. Sourcing will lean local wherever Feed the Mass's buying power lets it, including direct arrangements with area farms for a share of their crop — the kind of steady, guaranteed demand small producers rarely get.

Whatever doesn't sell won't go to waste, either. Vegetables that don't move get chopped into the medleys, stews, and meals Feed the Mass is already making by the thousands each week in the nonprofit’s commercial kitchen upstairs.

"Once this is up and going," Valentine said, "we're truly a zero-waste store."

For now, the ground floor is still mostly plans and framing. But the pitch is straightforward, and Valentine returns to it more than once: everyone needs food, food shouldn't cost what it currently does, and there's no reason a dense, walkable stretch of downtown Portland should be a place people can't buy a bag of onions. 

At 1st & Nourish, making money was never really the goal. Building a neighborhood that can feed itself is.