TOUR: Urban Greens Co-Op Market - Providence, RI

Urban Greens Co-Op Market
Opened: 2019

Owner: cooperatively owned

Previous Tenants: none

Cooperative: Coop Food Stores

Location: 93 Cranston St, Providence, RI

Photographed: February 5, 2025

Our next Providence stop is the Urban Greens Co-Op Market, a cooperatively owned natural food store to the southwest of downtown Providence on Federal Hill. It's a new-build store, having opened in 2019 but planned for more than ten years before that.

At just 8000 square feet, the store is quite small, and it feels small. Like Daily Stop, I visited this store at night, so it's hard to gauge how well it's doing. But some of the produce seemed past its prime, and the store has been cut back a bit since its opening. Produce and packaged prepared foods/deli are on the right side (there's no service deli here, and actually no service counters at all), with bulk foods facing in the first aisle. Packaged meats and other similar items are on the back wall, replacing what appears to have originally been a coffee shop. Dairy and frozen are on the left side.

The store is nice, but feels limited. It's certainly not in the league of some of the better cooperative stores, like the Weavers Way stores in Pennsylvania. Still, it's a good resource, as there's no other supermarkets on Federal Hill or in downtown Providence.

"El Cafe" -- part of which is visible to the right below -- seems to have originally been the sign for the coffee shop. See here. Frozen foods are now in this area, along with packaged meats and seafood. It feels like that would be a relatively easy fix, especially since the area is now meat and ice cream.

The grocery aisles are pretty straightforward, with a focus on natural and organic items. It looks like UNFI, which is based right here in Providence, is the primary supplier.

Dairy and the rest of frozen line the last aisle.

And a look at the front-end...

It's great to see a locally owned cooperative market, but it's also clear execution here is not what it could be. Hard to say if that's a result of low traffic or something else, given that I don't have much experience with the store. But it's still a nice local neighborhood market.

Speaking of, tomorrow we're going to see a really small neighborhood market over in the Fox Point area!