The government can lower grocery prices. It doesn’t have to run the stores | Fortune

The Kitchen Table Project has proposed a new approach to lowering grocery prices that avoids both government-run stores and price controls, according to Michigan State University food economist David L. Ortega. The proposal arrives as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani pursues a publicly owned grocery store model, one of the two conventional policy paths the plan seeks to bypass. Ortega, the Noel W. Stuckman Chair in Food Economics and Policy, argues that nearly every existing plan to cut food costs ultimately puts the government in the business of either operating stores or dictating prices. The Kitchen Table Project's alternative instead targets the underlying costs of food production and distribution rather than retail margins. The debate matters because food affordability has become a live political issue in major cities, with the New York experiment serving as the highest-profile test. What to watch next is whether the Kitchen Table Project's framework gains traction with policymakers as a third option.