October 10, 2024
After a devastating fire on July 14, Surefire Neighborhood Market has begun their recovery process and hopes to make a strong comeback.
“We’re looking forward to being back into the community and contributing to the further growth that we were doing there,” Surefire CEO Magloire Lubika said.
Since 2021, Surefire has been focused on redefining traditional convenience stores by changing the access to healthy food for the Sunset Park neighborhood – the predominantly Black neighborhood that his family spent a lot of time in, Lubika said.
“We wanted to just flip convenience stores and figure out exactly what would be a model convenience store that’s focused on food access,” Lubika said.
Surefire wants to change the perception of convenience store food – by offering grocery store food and meals from their kitchen.
“We try to get most of our ingredients from local sources,” Lubika said. “We’ve been known for having some of the best, best hot dogs in the city of Rock Hill. We just introduced chicken sandwiches and hamburgers as well…What’s convenient for us is making sure that it’s as fresh as possible, to ensure it’s freshness and how healthy it is and to make sure we prepare it as fast as possible for our guests. What we call our dining options is fast casual food. And so the same quality of food that you would get from a five-star restaurant, but it comes at you from a small convenience store.”
While changing the perception of what a convenience store can be, Surefire hopes to improve the image of the Sunset Park neighborhood.
“We’ve taken the liberty of showcasing that neighborhood through Surefire,” Lubika said. “So when guests who don’t live in that community come to Surefire, they’re building trust with Surefire, which in turn, turns to trust within the community.”
After the fire, Surefire received support from the Sunset Park neighborhood and the rest of the Rock Hill community – including mayor John Gettys.
“To have not only people, what we are, people who live in that neighborhood, but also people who don’t live in the community, also talk about the impact that sure buy has on them, I think it’s a beautiful thing,” Lubika said. “We’re looking forward to being back into the community and contributing to the further growth that we were doing there.”
Surefire is still working with their insurance company to settle the repair process, but hope to reopen and improve their storefront sometime in 2025.
“When you’re working so hard on building something, you don’t really get to see the benefits of it while you’re working,” Lubika said. “To have that, to have that pause where people are praising you for what you created. It’s like, wow. You know, what we were doing is something major.”
Surefire hopes to hold a clean up day once repairs begin – to reconnect the community with the market.
“So people can see the store for what it was in this last phase before we remodel,” Lubika said. “And just have everybody out there and have a good time helping us clean the store up and just getting ready to turn to the next chapter of Surefire.”
In the next month, Surefire hopes to move their food trailer from Slow Play Brewing to Sunset Park.
“We’re taking this as an opportunity to learn from any mistakes that we made and figure out how to better serve our customers for food accessibility,” Lubika said. “Making it more of a place where we’re also communities can come and join together and communicate, collaborate and just just redefine what convenience means in underserved communities.”
To support Surefire, visit https://www.surefiremarketco.com/donate.
