Concept 6 · Aurora
Strong Roots. Strong Futures.

Keep a place to buy food in rural America.

A learning institution training the specialists who walk alongside grocers, and the grocers themselves, to keep local food access alive.

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Our mission

Reversing the erosion of rural food access.

Rural independent grocery stores are closing at a rate that will leave a generation of towns without a place to buy food. We train the people who can change that, and we build the tools that help them do it.

5
Specialist levels
60+
Graduates
180°
The goal

The approach

Short-term roots. Long-term future.

01

Stabilize the roots

Resilience is built in the everyday decisions: pricing, product assortment, and where the labor goes.

02

Build the pathway

We bake the recipe for a successful transition into the daily mindset of operating a strong store.

03

Scale locally

How many leaders does it take? A lot, and local connections make the strongest networks.

For specialists

A cascade, not a catalog.

Level 1, RGI's Rural Grocery Transition Specialist course, qualifies you to help a grocer move through transition. The Academy picks up from there. Each level opens only to graduates of the level before it.

Join the specialist list
  • Level 1, Transition Specialist. Via K-State's RGI. The prerequisite for everything.
  • Level 2, Advanced Specialist. Twelve weeks on valuation, profitability, identity transition.
  • Ongoing, Community of Practice. Bi-weekly case work with other specialists.
  • Levels 3 to 5, Facilitator track. Train graduates to teach the levels below. Coming soon.

For grocers

  • The dashboard. Pricing and labor performance against revenue, in plain terms.
  • Twice-monthly Zoom. Profitability consultations plus peer breakout rooms.
  • Programming that follows the data. Aggregate patterns decide what we work on.
  • Business Builders, quarterly. Deciding on purpose what your business will be worth.

Be the store that can't be replaced.

Healthy Bucket shows how your pricing and labor are actually performing against your revenue, while you can still do something about it, plus a community of independent grocers working the same problems.

Join the Healthy Bucket list

Meet the founder

Carly Whorton, Founder

Carly Whorton · Founder

Built by someone who ran the store.

Carly co-founded Cecil K's Hometown Market in Holton, Kansas in 2017 with no prior grocery background, navigated it through the 2020 pandemic, opened a second location in 2022, and managed her own exit at the end of 2023. Since 2022 she has been the architect and lead facilitator of the Rural Grocery Transition Specialist program, the only national training program dedicated to rural grocery succession support.

Rural Grocery Initiative Viable Food Illinois Grocery Initiative