Forty Acres Fresh Market | Black Woman-Owned Grocery Store

Liz Abunaw didn’t set out to open a Black woman-owned grocery store on Chicago’s West Side. She stepped off the wrong bus. It was during her MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and she was running an errand in Austin — a neighborhood where Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson now lives. She needed cash. She looked around for a bank, a drugstore, anywhere she could make a small purchase. Nothing. “As I continued to look around,” she recalls, “I quickly realized that the amenities I was used to finding in neighborhoods like the South Loop, Wicker Park and Lincoln Park were not readily accessible in this area.” That question — where do the people in this neighborhood shop? — became the mission that built Forty Acres Fresh Market, Chicago’s answer to a food desert that had gone unaddressed for far too long.

The answer, for far too long, was: nowhere nearby. Austin is one of Chicago’s largest West Side neighborhoods — and for years it had no full-service grocery store. Residents had to leave their community, drive to Oak Park or other suburbs, just to buy meat, produce, and everyday essentials. As Abunaw noted after opening her doors: “The mayor lives on the next block. The man can afford food, but until we got here, he had to go into Oak Park to get food.”

That observation — born on a city bus, sharpened through a decade at General Mills, an MBA from Booth, and years of market research — became Forty Acres Fresh Market. Chicago’s only Black woman-owned, full-service grocery store. A direct answer to a question this city should have answered long ago.

The name is intentional. “Forty acres and a mule” was the promise made to formerly enslaved Black Americans after the Civil War — land, economic footing, a real start at generational wealth — and it was a promise the government never kept. Abunaw reclaimed that history. “What would it look like if we actually got our 40 acres?” she asked. For her, it looks like a fully stocked grocery store in the heart of a Black neighborhood that deserved one all along. “It ties back to where our food comes from,” she says, “and it’s a name rooted in history that would be very familiar to Black people. And since I am Black, and I wanted to open a store in a Black neighborhood — well, there you go.”

Forty Acres launched as a pop-up market on January 20, 2018, inside Austin’s Sankofa Cultural Arts and Business Center. Thirty customers. Five hundred dollars in revenue. From there, the snowball rolled. Pop-up markets across underserved Chicago neighborhoods. A grocery delivery service that exploded during COVID and now serves customers across the entire city. $185,000 from the Healthy Food Financing Initiative. $150,000 from the American Heart Association’s social impact fund. A $50,000 Famous Amos Ingredients for Success grant. And in 2022, a $2.5 million grant from the City of Chicago — backed by the Chicago Recovery Plan — to fund construction of the permanent store.

The building itself is part of the story. At 5713 W. Chicago Avenue at Waller Street, Forty Acres converted a shuttered Salvation Army thrift store into something the neighborhood had never seen. “This place used to look like a prison,” Abunaw says. “It had a small little entrance, no windows, just all concrete block.” The reimagined space — with its bold metal exterior, 45-degree angled panels, trapezoidal windows, and warm 1950s general store interior — is now a neighborhood anchor and won a 2025 Retrofit Award from Metal Architecture magazine. Inside, exposed historic bowstring trusses frame a full-service market with fresh produce, a butcher counter with custom cuts, dry goods, refrigerated and frozen grocery, and Mabel’s Meals — a made-to-order hot food bar helmed by Chef Martell Cammon.

Mabel is the store’s mascot — and the name carries weight. It’s named after Abunaw’s late great-grandmother, a woman her father always said could cook. It also references a line from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God: “Black women are the mules of the earth.” The tribute is layered, intentional, and deeply personal. Mabel’s Meals serves the Morning Glory breakfast sandwich, jerk chicken, coconut curry rice bowls, house-made black-eyed pea fritters with cilantro aioli, and house-made kettle chips in barbecue and lemon pepper. The Chicago Tribune called it out by name in a full restaurant review in February 2026.

Forty Acres is competitive on price — by design. “If we’re charging the same prices as other grocery stores, that means we’re doing it right,” Abunaw says. “That means we’re competitive. That means we’re in line.” This is not charity. This is commerce, done with conscience, in a community that has earned it.

“It’s not just business. It’s personal. And food is as personal as it gets.”

Produce to the People.

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