Looking for Dates for Ramadan? Go to the Corner Store

For as long as the holy month of Ramadan has been celebrated, Muslims around the world have broken their daily fast by eating one food more than any other: the soft, sticky-sweet, nutrient-rich date. It’s a tradition that goes back over 1,400 years, to the Prophet Muhammed himself.

Here in the Bay Area, that usually means Muslims will stock up on dates for Ramadan at their favorite Middle Eastern grocer or one of the big supermarket chains. But during this year’s holiday season, some lucky Oakland residents can also find dates at a more unlikely place: their local corner store.

At Jalisco Market in Deep East Oakland, for instance, a big box of Medjool dates is prominently displayed in the fluorescent-lit refrigerator for fresh produce right at the front of the store, sandwiched between some coconuts and a tray of apples. “Healthy Food for All,” reads the sign above the fridge.

If none of that squares with your vision of a typical corner store or liquor store in East Oakland, well, that’s precisely the point.

“It was always just chips, candy and soda,” Essai Talib, a Yemeni American who runs Jalisco Market along with his family, recalls of the store’s standard junk food inventory during its early years. Talib says he’s been eating dates for iftar (the traditional fast-breaking meal taken right after sunset during Ramadan) for as long as he can remember. This year, the Talibs decided to stock dates during the holiday season in part for their own use, and also to cater to Muslim customers, who make up a small but significant segment of the store’s clientele.

But the dates are only one tiny part of the store’s revamp. Ten years ago, Talib couldn’t have imagined that the entire front of his store would be dominated by shelves piled high with tomatoes, papayas, plantains and assorted chili peppers — that in a neighborhood with relatively few fresh food options, Jalisco Market would become a destination for healthy fruits and vegetables.

The change comes thanks to an Oakland nonprofit called Saba Grocers Initiative, which has helped turn a dozen corner stores around the city into viable produce markets. Talib says his family always hoped to offer fresh produce to the community; they didn’t go into business because they wanted to sell only junk food, cigarettes and booze. But when they tried sourcing fruits and vegetables on their own, the logistics proved to be untenable. Traditional produce distributors required the store to buy in bulk — a 25-pound box of tomatoes or 40-pound case of apples. There was no way for a small corner store to churn through that kind of volume, especially without the specialized refrigerators that supermarkets use to store and display their produce. “We’d sell a few, and the rest would go bad,” Talib says. “There was always more waste than we would sell.”

About five years ago, the Talibs turned to Saba Grocers for help. Launched in 2019 with $200,000 worth of Oakland soda tax money, the nonprofit focuses specifically on helping corner stores like Jalisco Market access fresh produce. Saba cofounder Lina Ghanem explains that her main inspiration was research indicating that nearly half of African American and Latino children in Oakland were expected to develop diabetes during their lifetime. “And our corner stores tend to be the main outlet where youth and children are getting soda,” Ghanem says.

The idea, then, was to make it much easier for these corner stores to provide healthier alternatives. So, Saba Grocers is the one who buys the big cases of produce and then breaks them down to redistribute on its ecommerce platform for participating stores, allowing a small corner store to buy just a couple of pounds of apples if it wants to. The nonprofit also buys small refrigerators and allows the markets to use them free of charge, as long as they’re used for storing fresh produce. And it provides free delivery, so store owners don’t have to personally drive over to the Jack London wholesale market at midnight to source their produce.

“We’re just trying to level the playing field,” Ghanem says.

For Jalisco Market, the program has been astoundingly successful. In the beginning, Talib says, the store had just the one small fridge of fruits and vegetables all the way in the back of the store. But the fresh produce proved to be so popular with customers that the Talibs dedicated more shelf space to it, pushing the chips and soda further and further back. “When you walk into the store now, the first thing you see is the produce,” Talib says. Now, he says, many of the parents who stop by the store on Sundays after church will buy an apple or an orange for their kids instead of chips or soda.

The initiative has also provided Jalisco Market with the opportunity to sell seasonally and culturally specific items that you wouldn’t expect to find at a corner store — like the dates, which Ghanem is sourcing this year through the Syrian family that operates the Damask Rose cafe in North Oakland, who ship Medjool dates in from Southern California and distribute them locally. For Ramadan, Saba Grocers is offering the dates to its markets at a discounted price. In addition to Jalisco Market, two other Arab American–owned corner stores are selling dates for Ramadan through Saba Grocers this year: A&G Market in the San Antonio District and Royal Foods on MacArthur Boulevard.

As a Palestinian American who grew up in a refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, Ghanem says she finds it particularly rewarding to work with the corner store community in Oakland, which is heavily Arab American and Muslim. According to Ghanem, 120 of the 200 corner stores in Oakland are owned by Arab Americans — most of them, like the Talibs, from Yemen. And one of the best outcomes of the Saba Grocers Initiative, she says, is the way it’s helped improve participating corner stores’ relationship with the communities in which they operate. Many of the stores are located in neighborhoods that are predominantly Black, Ghanem says, and there was some feeling that this was an “extractive business process” — that these store owners were making money off the community by selling junk food to their kids.

“The residents would complain about it,” she says. “Now, with the fresh produce in there, the residents are happier with our stores, and there’s a more familiar relationship happening there.”

Through the program, stores are also able to request culturally appropriate foods for their neighborhoods — things like nopales, chayote, bok choy, lychees and tamarind.

Jalisco Market’s Talib says he’s just glad to see how happy his Muslim customers are when they realize that the store is carrying dates during this holy season — that they don’t have to go out of their way to go to a bigger, more specialized market. And who knows? If it seems like there’s a demand for it, Talib says, they might even start selling dates year-round. “Whether it’s dates or anything else, we just try to listen to our customers and see what they want.”

Jalisco Market is located at 9170 Edes Ave. in Oakland. A&G Market is at 1849 E. 21st St., and Royal Foods is at 7615 MacArthur Blvd. All three stores are selling dates for Ramadan through Saba Grocers Initiative.