April 2025 Update

Radius has now been open exactly two months! Exhaustion, frustration, pride, satisfaction. There’s no sugar coating it — running a grocery store is hard. But when a returning customer comes in and says “you have the best peaches ever”, “the staff is so welcoming”, and “this is the farmer’s market I’ve always wanted”, it’s all worth it. Thank you for coming in to support us and for making the good days outweigh the bad. 

Read on for a few fun announcements and a reflection about grocery.

Announcements

• Vote for Radius as the best neighborhood grocery in The Austin Chronicle’s Best of Austin campaign! We’re thrilled to be nominated as a finalist, and it would be a sweet accomplishment to win in our first year. Please support us by voting — it only takes a few seconds! 
• TenTen x Radius Umami Wagyu Burger collaboration. We designed an amazing umami wagyu burger with TenTen that you can either get at TenTen’s happy hour (Mon - Sat) or pick up a 2 serving meal kit at Radius to prepare at home any day of the week. We have limited quantities and they sell out fast, so come in early each day to grab a kit.
• Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) approval! We now officially accept SNAP/EBT at Radius! 99% of our products qualify for SNAP and we are so proud to offer local, nutritious food to the local community that participates in SNAP. Just select the EBT payment option at checkout.
• Spring organic fruit. Organic peaches and blackberries are now at Radius! Finding organic Texas fruit can be a challenge because of the weather and bugs, but we’ve been hard at work sourcing. Come try our delicious local fruit and recover from the waterlogged produce at a typical grocery store.

Reflections

“You’re going to need a hot gas bypass with a desuperheater valve and evaporator pressure regulator.” No, this is not Back to the Future. This is life as a grocery store owner trying to learn as much about refrigeration as possible. If you’ve been in the store recently, you saw that our freezer was out of commission for a few weeks. We’ve been fighting our refrigeration infrastructure for weeks now, and it’s a massive pain. Moving product, tossing spoiled product, watching thermostats like a hawk. In many ways grocery is a race against time — getting products from the fields and getting them into customer hands as fast as possible before spoilage. Not having reliable refrigeration is a massive drag, and what I think about every morning. We have good consultants helping us out now, and I’m cautiously optimistic our woes will be resolved in the next few days.

Coming from a tech background, I never really had to think about the physical world in a business context. Bits are easy to ship. Now I worry about the weather (too much rain, not enough rain, just the right amount of rain), HVAC, refrigeration, humidity, vandalism, on and on. Running a local business is both “local” and “business” — managing the physical, local infrastructure and managing the business at the same time. Both are full-time jobs. Of course this is all obvious in retrospect, but it’s a big change from my context in the software world where “the cloud” is a climate-controlled warehouse somewhere far away, not a bringer of rain. I have so much more appreciation for all local businesses, especially food business that rely heavily on their physical infrastructure performing every day. 

Feedback

Our team lives by the mantra “Better Every Day.” We deeply value customer feedback — if you have any suggestions on how we can do better please send us an email at hi@eatradius.com. Thank you!