Albany man seeks to bridge food access gap with grocery store

ALBANY, Ohio — Gregg Montella, an Athens County local, is working to open a grocery store in Albany with a focus on affordability and local produce.

Montella announced plans for the store in a post on the Albany Neighbors Facebook group, a post that spread quickly among the Albany community, garnering over 700 reactions, over 250 comments and over 70 post shares.

Montella was excited to see such a positive community response to the planned grocery store. He told the Independent that he plans to host public meetings in the future for the community to provide input on the project.

“We want to get people involved,” Montella said. “There’s been several people that said they would paint [the grocery store] for free if the paints were supplied, just because they want to get a grocery store going.”

Montella said that he was motivated to open a grocery store in part by personal annoyance at needing to drive long distances to go grocery shopping.

“I just got tired of driving to Kroger every time I needed an orange, or a packet of yeast, or a good slab of bacon,” Montella said.

Montella recognizes that this also reflects a greater food access issue for the community.

According to Tim Kirkendall, the mayor of Albany, local residents have to drive to Jackson, McArthur or Athens to do their grocery shopping.

Montella told the Independent he plans to take advantage of the strong farming community that surrounds Albany to supply the store. Montella said that if a product can’t be found locally he will look regionally, and only if a product can’t be found regionally will he look nationally.

“Albany’s full of farmers. The whole region, Vinton, Meigs and Athens counties all converge right there in the Albany area,” Montella said. “There’s so many farmers that produce delicious, high quality produce, meats, dairy, everything. The Athens Farmers Market is great, but that’s only twice a week.”

“We wanted to give an opportunity to the local producers to have a place where they could sell all the time,” Montella added.

Kirkendall told the Independent that access to fresh produce would be a boon to the Albany community.

“We’ve got the dollar stores out here, which is a big help, but there’s just things they don’t carry fresh produce and things like that,” Kirkendall said.

In addition to the locally grown focus, Montella hopes to anchor the store in affordability. He said that he hopes to see a “bare minimum mark up” that will allow the store to stay in business and pay staff.

“I want to do everything we can to accept SNAP and then I would also like to go a step beyond that,” Montella said. “When the government shuts down things like this, I’d like to see how the community faith-based organizations, churches, nonprofits, individuals, and other businesses can step up and help meet needs.” 

So far, all Montella’s work on the project has been funded by his personal savings, but he told the Independent that he recently met with Rural Action, ACEnet and other community groups to learn about options for structuring the business. 

He’s considering business structures such as Limited Liability Corporations, more commonly known as LLCs, S-Corporations, individual proprietorship, nonprofits and social enterprises.

The building is an old property that Montella already owns. At different points in its history it’s been a bookstore, a grocery store and an art studio.

Montella said he hopes a mural will be painted on the side of the building that will celebrate the local community and its history.

“We would want [the mural] to be non-partisan, patriotic, something that everybody can look at and feel proud of Albany, the history of Albany,” Montella said.

Unfortunately the building’s age has caught up with it. Montella estimated that the building needs about $200,000 in repairs before grocery store necessities like refrigeration and air conditioning  can be installed.

The prospect of a new business opening up in a formerly vacant building has Kirkendall excited for the future of Albany. Kirkendall pointed to Threefold Roasters as a business with a similar story. The store moved into a formerly vacant building and has had a positive impact on the community, he said.

“We’ve got [Threefold Roasters] uptown there and it draws in a lot of people.” Kirkendall said. “We’ve got a couple other buildings as vacant. If we can get something like a grocery store, I think maybe someone else would follow with something else.”

Montella’s faith-inspired work and advocacy

Montella’s drive to open the grocery story reflects a longer-standing commitment to leadership and faith-based organizing. He serves as the director of Heroes International, a humanitarian organization currently focused on helping those affected by the war in Ukraine. 

Montella told the Independent that his community involvement can be traced back to a crisis of faith that he experienced when he was in high school. During this period, Montella said he asked God for a sign and described a subsequent religious experience that led him to ultimately attend seminary school to become an ordained nondenominational minister. 

Afterwards, Montella participated in various mission trips focusing on eastern Europe. As part of these missions Montella painted orphanages and schools, spoke to students and engaged in other forms of community outreach.

Montella then worked as an anti-sex trafficking advocate for a number of years.

“I was seeing my translators in Ukraine be trafficked — it was heartbreaking,” Montella said.

During this time Montella also began organizing support for abandoned seniors in Eastern Europe, ensuring that they had access to food, medicine and shelter. Montella links his focus on supporting seniors to his childhood, when he was raised by his grandparents.

Throughout all of this, Montella maintained his Albany connections. 

He began spending more time in Albany starting in 2018, because he wanted to see more of his grandparents. Montella told the Independent that he was looking for a project to occupy his time when he was home, and he came across the various vacant buildings that occupy Washington Road in Albany.

Montella thought that if more businesses opened up, they could attract people to Albany and bring more economic opportunities to the local community. Threefold Roastersis owned and run by Montella’s close friends out of a building that he owns, helping build the vision..

“The coffee shop that went in was the first business and they just did great,” Montella said. “[Threefold Roasters] has done a phenomenal job in attracting the community, proving that people are willing to stop in Albany. Everybody keeps saying, ‘Now we want some place to eat, now we want fresh food.’”

Montella does not know exactly when the grocery story will open, as the idea remains in the early stages of development.