A New Independent Grocery Store Brings Fresh Produce and Good Vibes to Austin

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More than three years ago, Liz Abunaw imagined what the Forty Acres Fresh Market independent grocery store she was working towards opening on the West Side in Austin would be like. Now that dream is becoming a reality, with the official opening of Forty Acres’ physical store at 5713 W. Chicago Avenue. 

“It is the place where you are in the middle of making a dish and you run out of something and you run up two blocks to go get it,” she told WTTW then. “It’s your store that you go to thinking you’re going to buy one thing and come out with a meal, a bottle of wine, what you intended to buy, and five other things. It’s the place where you jam out to the in-store radio. It’s the place where you know the cashier, you know the manager, you know the person who cuts your meat. It’s this community hub, where you do the business of buying your food, you see your neighbors, you enjoy what your neighborhood has to offer.”

While the store can’t offer bottles of wine until completing the long process to get a liquor license, the staff is friendly enough that they could soon learn regulars’ names, a hot bar offers meals to go, a wide range of products is on the shelf, and the in-store radio is bumping so that you can hear people singing along from one aisle over and might spot Abunaw herself dancing.

That doesn’t mean she’s satisfied.

“I have to acknowledge just getting to the point of being open with a store that so many people say are beautiful, with a store that people seem to enjoy being in, a store where people say they are finding the products that they need and want,” she said in her office at the store, in between fielding constant questions from her managers. “Even if there's more I want to do.”

It has been a long road to get here. Abunaw first got into the grocery business eight years ago, offering fresh produce via pop-up markets and delivery, a service that continues separately from the brick-and-mortar store. Abunaw acquired a space for the store in 2020 and the build-out started in 2023, with funding and partnership through various stages from the Westside Health Authority, Christopher Family Foundation, Lumpkin Family Foundation, and state and city grants. Running and opening a grocery store is expensive; it’s a low-margin business reliant on highly perishable goods.

Austin lacked walkable, easy access to fresh groceries due to decades of disinvestment that have only begun to be addressed; plans were just announced for another grocery store in the location of a Save a Lot that shuttered suddenly in 2020. 

Abunaw said that, even though there are stores where people in Austin can buy groceries, the experience and quality can leave something to be desired, pointing to Google reviews of her own store. “[Reviewers] comment on the cleanliness. And I think that’s a testament to the stores they’ve been experiencing in Austin. They comment on the friendliness of the staff. They comment on the hot food bar a lot. Those are points of differentiation.”

The hot bar offers breakfast sandwiches and rice bowls, while the store also has a manned butcher counter, freshly cut fruit, fresh produce, bulk nut and grain dispensers, and four aisles of everything from windshield fluid to canned goods to frozen food. There are products geared towards predominantly Black Austin – collards, smoked pork tails and neckbones, chitterlings, crawfish – as well as neighboring Oak Park. 

“Most of the time, money flows from Austin to Oak Park,” since Austin residents often have to leave the neighborhood to find the stores they want, Abunaw said. “Our goal is to reverse it.” So she set out to fill what she saw as a gap in the market.

“I wanted to create the grocery store I wanted to shop at,” Abunaw said. Forty Acres is smaller than many chain grocery stores, and while it can also act as a convenient quick stop, “you can still get a full grocery trip in here,” she said. “I believe that sometimes too much choice is actually not a good thing.” 

She’s trying to offer prices between Walmart and Whole Foods, with various price points thanks to private label and brand-name offerings. Around three quarters of her 20 or so employees are from the area – just like the customer base she hopes to cultivate. 

The store officially opened on September 14, and is open 8:00 am to 8:00 pm daily.