The scourge of hunger is spreading across America. 45 million people, including 13 million children, face food insecurity. The problem is especially intense in New York City, where food prices have jumped by over 56% since 2015.

Zohran has proposed bringing down food prices by establishing a network of city-owned grocery stores, starting with a pilot program of five stores, one per borough. The idea is to offer cheaper groceries by buying and selling at wholesale prices as a non-profit, essentially passing the would-be profits of the “middle man” retailer onto consumers.

The proposal is popular among New York’s working class. Forbes reported that 91% of NYC residents are concerned about food inflation, and four out of five households struggle to afford groceries. But for capitalists in the highly-monopolized food market, the idea of a “public option” poses a threat to their profits, especially if they succeed and proliferate. This is why the capitalist media has rushed to call Zohran’s plan a “glib superficiality” and warned the public to prepare for “Soviet bread lines.”

The attacks from the billionaires won’t be limited to op-eds. The real power the food conglomerates wield is their relationship with suppliers. In the grocery industry, which typically runs on slim profit margins of 2–5%, scale is decisive. Because the conglomerates own so many stores, they are able to negotiate extremely favorable terms for bulk orders of food. Together, the top three wholesale food distributors in NYC supply the shelves of over 7,500 supermarkets, offering the best rates to the largest clients.

Additionally, many of the largest companies are vertically integrated, meaning they own multiple links throughout the chain of food production, from agriculture to packaging to distribution.

The largest grocery company in NYC, Key Food, operates 154 stores in the city, and the top four grocery chains own over 400 stores across the five boroughs. Zohran’s five stores will have to compete for supply on the open market with enormous conglomerates like these, some of which actually own the food suppliers.

This is why previous attempts at establishing public supermarkets elsewhere in the country haven’t fared well. A town-owned market in Baldwin, Florida, closed in 2024, with the mayor explaining how “chain stores that buy in bigger volumes could stock their inventory at far lower costs.” The state of Illinois opened six public grocery stores in 2012; four of them have since closed down, citing an inability to compete with the prices of national chains. City-owned Erie Market in Kansas was bought out in 2024 for similar reasons. All of these public stores were opened in food deserts, meaning they were cannibalized by the market even without nearby competitors.

The only way to provide cheap groceries to the entire population is to take over the entire supply chain from the farms and ports to the grocery shelf, and merge it into a unified, democratically planned food system run for need, not profit. If even a single link in the food supply chain remains in the hands of capitalists, it will leave any plan exposed to attacks like those outlined above.

This would obviously require class struggle on a national scale, but Zohran could take the first step in this direction. New York’s workers are hungry for change—even 54% of the city’s Republican voters support publicly owned grocery stores, according to the polling reported by Forbes. If Zohran drew clear class lines and explained that the conflict is one between capitalist profits vs. feeding working families, the socialist program to end hunger once and for all would secure mass support.