Phoenix Council Unanimously Adopts 2030 Food Action Plan, Citing Community Outreach and Focus on Food Access

The Phoenix City Council unanimously adopted the 2030 Phoenix Food Action Plan on June 9, approving a five-year strategy the city said grew from years of community engagement and builds on earlier action from the 2025 plan.

The plan, presented to council by Assistant City Manager Ginger Spencer and the Office of Environmental Programs, draws on outreach to more than 2,300 residents and a series of public workshops. Office staff said the plan centers on four strategic priorities—food access, education and training, production, and resilience—and packages tangible actions such as neighborhood food production, community kitchens, gardening education, food-prescription programs and mobile produce markets.

"This plan is going to help us be a more resilient city," said Maddie Mercer, food systems environmental program manager, describing an "investment menu" process that let residents vote on which solutions to prioritize. City slides cited that 70% of survey respondents reported barriers to accessing healthy food and that 37% had worried about running out of food in the prior 12 months.

Nancy Allen, environmental programs director, told council the 2025 plan helped the city scale emergency food efforts during COVID and reported progress on many prior actions. "Through coordinated efforts and federal CARES funding we delivered millions of meals and diverted nearly 100,000 pounds of food from landfill," Allen said.

Public commenters and nonprofit partners largely supported adoption at Tuesday’s meeting. Ginger Sykes Torres of Local First Arizona praised the plan’s emphasis on community kitchens and urban agriculture, and Marco Scouts of St. Mary's Food Bank said expanded participation in public food-assistance programs aligned with the food bank’s work. Caesar Gonzalez announced that Viarta supermarket expects to open a 36,000-square-foot location in South Phoenix in 2027, a retail addition he said would help address a local food desert.

Council members pressed staff on measurement, funding, zoning and how federal program changes have affected local food systems. In response, staff said the city seeks to build a stronger baseline dataset at the city and county level (USDA food-desert metrics were described as outdated), will pursue a zoning text amendment to clarify where urban agriculture can operate, and described an OEP baseline of roughly $380,000 in annual general-fund support for ongoing programs, supplemented by cross-departmental funds and grant opportunities.

After discussion and public comment, the council voted by roll call 9–0 to adopt the plan. The action item appears in the meeting record as the motion "to adopt the 2030 food action plan," and the clerk recorded a unanimous vote.

Council indicated next steps will include developing an implementation dashboard and continued cross-departmental coordination. Staff said they will return with performance reporting and a proposal to collect improved baseline data so the city can more precisely measure progress toward the plan’s goals.