Neighborhood Produce in Ball Square is offering fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, baked goods, and much more via online ordering. —Photo by Bobbie Toner

By Anqi Zhang

“It’s here and it’s epic, folks. It’s something we started pre-Covid and we didn’t let the pandemic stop us – we’re opening a second location in Ball Square!” wrote on the latest Instagram post from Neighborhood Produce, a grocery store located in the community of Sommerville.

The new space is now only available for online orders. From Thursday through Tuesday, customers can pick up between noon and 6:00 p.m. Under the team’s efforts, they made the turnaround to one hour, decreased from the 48-hour waiting time before.

From household items to vegetables, fruits, dairy, eggs, meat and bulk staples, Neighborhood Produce takes pride in their variety of products. Customers can visit the store and get everything they need to build a meal, the owner and founder Matt Gray noted.

Under the post announcing their opening, comments manifested a sense of community Neighborhood Produce has been building since the founding of their first store in Winter Hill in 2017. Seventy-five percent of the opening funds were collected from neighbors and friends through a campaign at that time.

— Photo by Matt Gray

Targeting itself as “a neighborhood market that you can actually do your grocery shopping,” Gray said the store was “kind of the idea to get away from ordering everything online, and kind of getting back to the neighborhood shopping for your groceries in a place where people actually know you.”

You can see Neighborhood Produce’s philosophy of building connections and community in the details. Gray envisioned a bulk section for customers to self-serve themselves when designing the new space in Ball Square. Aiming to reduce plastic waste, Gray expected the store to be a place without plastic bags at all. The plan has yet to be realized due to the pandemic, but is still being arranged.

Out of such concern for the community and the environment, Neighborhood Produce collaborates with a bunch of small local organizations, including Elizabeth Peabody House, a non-profit organization in Somerville, and Food Link MA, a food rescue organization. They make donations and reduce food waste. “We compost anything that we can’t donate,” Gray said. “So as far as surplus, we don’t have any actual food waste going into the waste stream.”

Although the online operation exceeded Gray’s expectations, their belief in building community is still blossoming. “My wife and I, we live in the neighborhood of our first store in Winter Hill, so we’ve really gotten to know everybody that lives there,” Gray said. “We can already tell the same things are happening here at Ball Square already, meeting everybody in the neighborhood.”

Neighborhood Produce is located at 691 Broadway in Somerville. Visit them online at https://neighborhoodproduce.square.site/.