OKLAHOMA CITY – The nonprofit-led Market at EastPoint grocery store in OKC’s Eastside celebrated five years Tuesday with decorations, giveaways, and a typically busy day filled with the same locals and community customers that have made the store a success.
For a half-decade, the Market has been an anchor of the rejuvenated EastPoint development near NE 23rd and Rhode Island Ave in the heart of Oklahoma City’s predominantly Black – and historically neglected – Eastside community.
When the store first opened its doors in April of 2021, Eastside had long been left as a “food desert,” with no full-service grocery stores left in the area and dwindling access to fresh, local, or nutritious food options as chains and corporate retailers had abandoned the area.
Community non-profit RestoreOKC raised funds locally to help open the Market at EastPoint (and the Eastside Eatery micro-restaurant inside) with a focus on non-profit pricing and fresh, local produce alongside the standard and expected grocery items.
Free Press was there for the project’s very first ribbon-cutting in 2020:
With their model now a proven success and a proven anomaly in a struggling and increasingly dire grocery economy hit hard by inflated pricing and crumbling supply chains, RestoreOKC is attempting the same kind of community rescue once again, looking to raise over $7 million to take over the Eastside Homeland before it closes.
“We’ve had five years of showing the impact to community health, to economic activity, to job creation,” RestoreOKC CEO Caylee Dodson told Free Press Tuesday. “Hopefully we’ve stewarded well the opportunity this community has given us for the last five years, and there’s enough return to make it warrant the larger investment.”
Community success
The Market’s success has been a surprise to some, especially in a modern grocery ecosystem that bets big on trendy, prepackaged foods and sprawling megastore models.
But Dodson believes it’s worked because they were able to start from the community’s needs and wants, not from a profit goal.
“People said we were crazy for giving as much square footage in the store to produce as we do,” she said. “But the community said ‘we want to be able to buy fresh produce here. If it was here, we’d buy it.’ And guess what? It’s been here for five years and the community buys it.”
That policy of paying closer attention to what customers want and what they ask for has formed the identity of the Market at EastPoint, not just as a grocer, but as a community anchor for the neighborhood.
“It’s a little bit more of a bodega model,” Dodson said. “It’s not just a grocery store, it’s communal. A lot of people come multiple times a week and we chop it up with people. You know, we’re sharing life more freely, and we love that about this space, and we want to be able to see more of that.”
Plans to buy Eastside Homeland
They may be seeing much more of that community, in fact, if RestoreOKC is able to raise more than $7 million by year’s end in order to purchase the Eastside Homeland store at NE 36th and Lincoln Blvd. and save it from closing.
Homeland owner HAC Inc. announced earlier this year that financial struggles and wider market challenges will lead them to close, sell, or consolidate a large number of their stores statewide.
That news came as another hit to the Eastside community, who had pushed for years to secure a Homeland location in their area for a larger-scale, all-purpose grocery and community hub.
Dodson and RestoreOKC know what that store has come to mean for the community, and with their non-profit grocery model proven to work through The Market at EastPoint, they’re turning once again to community partners and foundations to raise the capital needed to buy the Eastside Homeland outright and keep it operating.
“$7.5 million is a lot to raise, but $2.4 million felt impossible at first, too,” Dodson said, referring to the original $2.4 million raised to open and launch The Market at EastPoint.
“It would obviously be a little different, because we’d be buying the asset, the actual building itself,” she explained. “But it’s the same model in a lot of ways, because we know how to run a public/private partnership, we know how to operate a store, and we know how to have staff in supportive employment that we’re supporting.
That experience and confidence in the model has already brought in some major investment for the project.
“Mercy Health has already made a significant commitment,” Dodson said, “because it hits every one of their priorities for community health. It’s local food, it’s food access, it’s health and advancing different health equity pieces of the puzzle. And then it’s housing and job creation. It’s all of those things.”
‘This isn’t going anywhere’
Future plans aside, Dodson said she was just happy to be able to celebrate five years of success for The Market at EastPoint with so many of the store’s customers and supporters on Tuesday.
“Humbled and very excited, I think, is what I feel today,” she said. “This was once just an incredible, wild, crazy dream.”
And with the store still fulfilling its role and marking its success – even as so much of the grocery and retail market is straining and struggling – she said that The Market is already prepared for another five years.
“We just love the impact this store gets to have,” Dodson told Free Press. “Even if we get to do Homeland, this isn’t going anywhere. We just want to see it multiply.”
Brett Fieldcamp is the owner and Editor in Chief of Oklahoma City Free Press. He has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly two decades and served as Arts & Entertainment Editor before purchasing the company from founder Brett Dickerson in 2026.
He is also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
