Wadada Healthy Market and Juice Bar, Atlanta’s first Black woman-owned health market and juice bar, is celebrating five years of business in the West End. The fifth-anniversary celebration will be held on Saturday, April 6 from 11 a.m.-7 p.m. with a unity ceremony at 2 p.m. The celebration will include all-day giveaways, a new menu launch, tastings and discounts on purchases of $20 or more.
When Jeanette Sellers, also known as Sister Nilajah Ma’at, opened Wadada in 2019, it was born out of a need to address the health crisis in the Black community. Over the past 30 years, Sellers said she had to watch as many of her family members, young and old, died due to heart disease and cancer. The illnesses within her family led her to adopt a plant-based lifestyle and explore the Rastafari movement, a spiritual way of life developed in Jamaica that stresses eating fresh, organic and preferably homegrown produce.
Through that lifestyle change of eating healthier foods, Sellers said the journey gave her the roadmap of combining foods to increase healing.
“Wadada is here to hopefully encourage our community to simplify their diet and make healthier choices,” Sellers said.
“We have to solve our own problems. Profit over people is deeply entrenched in the culture of America, and so people benefit from sickness. That’s really just the bottom line. Unfortunately, Black communities are the most neglected, and I’m just here to kind of solve the problem and be a servant and see what I can do to change our state and our condition because it can be changed and it doesn’t it really doesn’t take a lot.”
According to the Department for Health and Human Services’ Office of Minority Health, African Americans are generally at higher risk for heart diseases, stroke, cancer, asthma, influenza and pneumonia, diabetes and HIV/AIDS compared to their white counterparts. These risks are due, in part, to a lack of access to affordable and healthy food in low-income, minority neighborhoods.
A report by Emory University’s Rollin School of Public Health in 2023 stated that 75% of Atlanta’s residents lived within a half-mile of fresh produce in 2020 compared to 52% in 2015. However, the progress that had been achieved through residents gaining access to new neighborhood markets, grocery stores and farmer’s markets was seen primarily in neighborhoods with higher proportions of white residents.
The vegan grocery store is working to bridge that gap, and its efforts are present on every shelf and wall lined with herbs, tonics, cold-pressed juices and vegan meals. The menu is intentional, incorporating organic fruits and vegetables such as strawberries, blueberries and ginger, the latter of which is blended in all Wadada’s smoothies along with sea moss.
Each smoothie is blended with various superfoods and adaptogens that help to pump minerals into the body and address issues prevalent in the Black community such as stress, heart disease, digestion, brain fog, cognition, immunity and circulation. The store also sells food items such as vegan Jamaican patties, sea moss jelly and vegan desserts.
From a wife who buys a natural herb that helps her truck-driving husband sleep when nothing else has worked to a daughter who was able to use products from Wadada to help naturally treat her mother’s colon cancer, the testimonies have shown Sellers that she has crafted something impactful and positive.
“People come in all the time and they say ‘Thank you for putting this type of store here. Thank you for putting this in our community,’ which lets me know that it’s valued because it’s one of those things where it’s just like, build it and they will come.”
Sellers has also been able to give back to other local Black-owned business owners by carrying their products at Wadada and hosting food trucks and pop-ups throughout the week.
“Our health and our wealth — those two things come together. So financially, if we’re not sound and we’re not grounded financially, that causes stress. Then stress causes disease. And so, it’s about creating wealth. It’s cooperative economics.”
In the next five years, Sellers hopes to open five more locations in the Atlanta area and move the flagship store into a bigger space to continue to promote health and wellness, two things she said are a divine right.
“Wellness is our birthright, and we just want to make sure that every member of our community experiences health and wellness as a kind of right of how nature intended it. Nature gives us everything so abundantly that it’s almost like a message to us that you just have to tap into what is available and this is your divine right.”