Portland native Chrisetta Mosley has a passion for produce and a deep desire to make it accessible to the Black community.
Mosley has owned a catering company, given food demonstrations, self-published a cookbook and written a blog called Farewell Fatso. Now, she’s partnering with the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition, the Soul District Business Association and greenHAUS art gallery on Roots Marketplace, a popup produce market with a mission to increase access to affordable, high-quality, fresh food. In addition to produce, the markets feature wellness products, baked goods, flowers and art from Black vendors.
Roots Marketplace hosted a handful of markets over the summer at the intersection of Northeast Sumner Street and Northeast MLK Jr. Boulevard. Mosley hopes to do a similarly themed holiday market this winter.
We talked with Mosley about her food journey and her big dream of opening a grocery store for the Black community.
You’ve worked in marketing, health care, customer service and more. But your focus for the last several years has been food. How did you find your way into the food business? I’m really into food styling and I put all my food on Facebook and my Facebook friends were like “Oh my God, that looks so good.” So I started Beets Catering, and through word of mouth, it took off and ran with it for about three years. I was pretty successful, I had clients like Fred Meyer and Prosper Portland. I was doing well but then I took a hiatus from it, which is what led me to Roots Marketplace.
Starting a produce market, even a popup market, seems like a huge undertaking. What’s been your motivation? I've been overweight my whole entire life. Through diet and exercise, I’ve lost 170 pounds. During that time, I was taking a class called food and your health at Clark College. I was older and eager to learn and the professor and I had really good rapport. The professor knew about my journey to lose weight and was very interested in my story. At the time I was writing a blog called Farewell Fatso, you can still find it online. I was featured on AM Northwest, I was doing cooking demonstrations at Chuck’s Produce in Vancouver and my classes were filling up. My professor said we need to some of these recipes into our curriculum. She set up an interview with the health department and I ended up writing a cookbook called “Shop Cook Eat, Outside the Box with Chrisetta Mosley" with 60 recipes. I self-published it and they used it for six years in their curriculum at college and I came in every quarter and gave cooking demonstrations.
How did you take all that and come up with the idea for Roots Marketplace? Everybody always thought the next step for me would be a restaurant. But I just never wanted a restaurant. It just isn't me. I don't want to cook for you, I want you to cook for yourself? Cooking for yourself is going to be the best thing. I just want a store because that way I can house all the ingredients. I want to create a store for us Black people. ...When you walk into the store, you know that you belong there because they'll be artwork on the walls and music on the overhead speakers that reflect us. And they'll be the different products, like haircare products, and spices that are hard to find.
And, of course, the food. Oh yes, it will have the food we like to eat. Sure some things we shouldn't eat all the time, but let's have them there anyway. We want to cook our beans with the ham hocks, we want to eat our greens with the ham hocks. We like cornbread and grits and black eyed peas. Let’s make those things accessible to us. And I want produce. It's going to be produce-centric. The grocery store is my big goal.
And you see Roots Marketplace as a step in that direction? Yes. The opportunity came up and I thought I can bring in vendors, they can sell their things. I can use it as a proof of concept, so when it's time to talk to investors and lenders about this idea, they can see that I’ve done something like this.
Chrisetta Mosley
Title: Founder Roots Marketplace
Previous: Owner of Beets Catering
Books: “Shop Cook Eat Outside the Box with Chrisetta Mosley"
Hometown: Portland
Education: Bachelor's degree in Journalism, Seattle University
Dream: To open a grocery story that caters to Black Portlanders
