Community research · Camden, NJ
The Grocery Commute
Camden is surrounded by food. Almost none of it is reachable.
Darryl Wooten · October 2026
For the roughly one in three Camden households without a car, buying a week of groceries starts with a question about how to get there and how to get back.
How those households actually get to a store (a ride, a bus, a walk) the data cannot see. What it can see is distance, so that is what we measured, and we measured it on foot: not straight lines across a map, but real routes along Camden's streets and sidewalks.
About seven in ten residents, roughly 52,000 people, live more than a half-mile walk from a full-size store. Around 23,000 live more than a mile out. The longest walk in the city runs about a mile and a half each way: a little over half an hour there, the same back, with bags.
The short version
- Camden has 107 SNAP-accepting stores, but only five are full-size supermarkets.
- Philadelphia doesn't close the gap. Removing every Pennsylvania store changed no neighborhood's walking distance.
- Nearly 2,400 farms surround the city, yet there is no listed South Jersey food hub within thirty miles, and no listed New Jersey farmers market within six miles that takes SNAP or WIC.
- Two federal food desert maps disagree about Camden: twelve census tracts under USDA's half-mile standard (three under the original one-mile standard) versus zero. That difference can decide funding eligibility.
What the city actually has
Camden is not short of places that sell food. It is short of places to buy groceries. Of the 107 stores that accept SNAP, 47 are convenience stores and 43 are small grocers. Five, fewer than one in twenty, are large enough to count as a supermarket or super store.
A corner store is a real business doing real work. It is often the only thing open late, and for a quick trip it is exactly what a block needs. But it was never built to hold a family's weekly groceries. Counting those stores as grocery stores is how a neighborhood ends up looking well supplied on paper and feeling bare on foot.
The five full-size stores
| Store | Location |
|---|---|
| Cousin's Supermarket | Marlton Avenue, East Camden |
| Universal Supermarket | Federal Street |
| Cramer Hill Supermarket | River Road, Cramer Hill |
| Fayer's Market | Haddon Avenue |
| Save A Lot | Mount Ephraim Avenue |
Where the walk is longest
These are the parts of Camden where a long walk, deep poverty and no car land on the same blocks. Walking distance is to the nearest full-size store.
| Area | People | Poverty | No car | Walk |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Waterfront South | 1,037 | 61% | 49% | 1.53 mi |
| Near Broadway & Federal | 4,739 | 51% | 49% | 1.35 mi |
| Near Ferry & Mt. Ephraim | 3,273 | 47% | 32% | 1.25 mi |
| Bergen Square | 2,594 | 48% | 55% | 1.10 mi |
| Near Haddon & Whitman Park | 1,992 | 33% | 57% | 0.74 mi |
On a map, Philadelphia's supermarkets sit barely a mile from parts of Camden. We removed every Pennsylvania store from the calculation and ran it again. The walking distance for all nineteen Camden neighborhoods stayed exactly the same. The only way to cross the Delaware on foot is the Ben Franklin Bridge.
A well-stocked city sits across the water. For someone walking home with groceries, it may as well not be there.
One address, four decades
A Pathmark at 2881 Mount Ephraim Avenue closed in 2013. A PriceRite opened in the same building in 2014, called at the time the first new supermarket in Camden in roughly forty years, and closed without warning in June 2021. A Save A Lot moved in under local owners in 2022 and is still there. Two other announced supermarkets, a ShopRite and a Fresh Grocer, were never built.
Camden's food situation is not a story about a city that never had stores. It is a story about a city that keeps losing them and keeps being promised new ones.
What is already close by
Camden County and three nearby South Jersey counties hold nearly 2,400 farms producing more than $440 million of food a year. More than 350 of them already sell directly to people. But there is no food hub listed in South Jersey within thirty miles of the city, and the two New Jersey farmers markets within six miles are not listed as accepting SNAP, WIC or nutrition vouchers. Inside Camden, community gardens and urban farms are growing food in some of the same neighborhoods where the walk to a store is longest.
Where the pieces could connect
This is not a plan. The organizations working in Camden have been at this far longer than this research has. These are places where the data shows pieces sitting next to each other with no link between them.
A market inside the city that takes benefits. The farms that sell direct already exist. The customers already exist. The link does not.
The grocers who stayed. Getting local produce into stores that already exist is a shorter distance than recruiting a chain that has been promised twice and delivered zero times.
A South Jersey connection to a hub that already runs. Three food hubs operate within five miles. None is listed as serving South Jersey.
The growing already happening here. Regional data can show where that production sits relative to need.
A note on the federal record
USDA publishes two maps of where people have trouble reaching food, and funders use them to decide where help goes. They disagree about Camden. The older map counts only supermarkets and large grocers; the newer one counts any store that accepts SNAP.
| Older map | Newer map | |
|---|---|---|
| Tracts counted as low-income | 19 | 19 |
| Tracts flagged as a food desert | 12 (half-mile); 3 (one-mile) | 0 |
The whole difference is whether a corner store counts as a grocery store. A program keyed to the older map may already count Camden as eligible. A program keyed to the newer one will not. Check which map a funder uses.
How this was put together
Everything here comes from official federal and state data that anyone can check. Stores: USDA's list of SNAP-authorized retailers, third quarter 2026; each of the five full-size stores was separately confirmed open. Maps: USDA Food Access Research Atlas. Walking distance: shortest walking paths on a pedestrian network built from OpenStreetMap, about 614 miles of walkable ways. Population, poverty and cars: American Community Survey, 2024. Farms: USDA Census of Agriculture, 2022. Markets and food hubs: USDA Local Food Portal and the New Jersey WIC farmers market list.
What this does not cover: buses, hills, sidewalk conditions or whether a route feels safe; markets that aren't registered in the federal directory; and price, which for many families matters as much as distance.