Rural Grocery Awards
The 2026 National Rural Grocery Summit Steering Committee is excited to announce the winners of the Rural Grocer of the Year Award and Grocery Champion of the Year Award! This is a chance to celebrate those who are leading the way and making a positive difference in the world of rural grocery.
Rural Grocer of the Year
Across the board, grocers deserve recognition and thanks for all they do for our communities. This award recognizes independent rural grocers (owners and/or managers) who have demonstrated excellence in community engagement, innovation, customer service, and more. Read about all of our finalists here.
Emily and Kaden Roush, owners of Main Street Mercantile in Lebanon, KS, received the 2026 Rural Grocer of the Year Award. Emily and Kaden are community-minded entrepreneurs who truly stepped up to meet their community's needs. In 2023, they purchased the local grocery store, which was in disrepair, and utilized their creative community-building, grant writing, and fundraising skills to completely remodel and reopen the store. This effort provided essential access to local and healthy food for their rural community, with a population of 181, many of whom are on fixed income and/or do not have the ability to travel to the next closest grocery store, 15-20 miles away.
In their new store, they offer a full-service grocery store, including a full butcher counter, fresh produce, all the staple items, and an abundance of locally grown and processed meats. As family farmers themselves at R Family Farms, they partner with other local producers to aggregate and sell locally grown pork, chicken, beef, bison, elk, turkey, and other products. Emily and Kaden provide critical jobs for local residents and truly create a community feel in their store, making it a gathering place.
Emily also provides consultation to others to share about her success and support others starting rural businesses. They've partnered with numerous local businesses and are even expanding again to provide local egg aggregation and sales. Emily and Kaden truly embody innovation in all aspects of providing healthy and safe food in rural Kansas. They are truly meeting the needs of the community by providing fresh, healthy food, creating a regional hub for local producers and building a strong local food system.
Grocery Champion of the Year
Grocery stores play a critical role in our communities, which is why so many of us dedicate our time to support them. Champions may include members of nonprofit organizations, businesses, elected officials, and more.
Lori Capouch, retired NDAREC Rural Development Director, received the 2026 Grocery Champion of the Year Award. Lori's work has directly strengthened rural grocery viability through leadership, coalition-building, and practical innovation grounded in the realities of rural communities. For more than 30 years, she has served as a behind-the-scenes cooperative development champion who travels to small towns to help address quality-of-life challenges—especially food access.
As North Dakota experienced a rapid decline in rural grocery stores, Lori helped lead a statewide response. Lori also brought rural food access challenges to state leaders, contributing to a state senate resolution and a 2019 interim legislative study focused on rural grocery distribution and transportation barriers. Lori facilitated the development of the Rural Access Distribution (RAD) Cooperative in Walsh County — an innovative shared services model that improves rural grocers’ buying power through cooperative purchasing and redistribution. This is recognized as the first-known rural food access and distribution cooperative in the United States. Rather than treating each grocery store as an isolated business, Lori helped rural communities build a shared services cooperative approach. Through RAD, grocery stores cooperatively purchase products to increase volume and reduce wholesale prices. One local store serves as a redistribution hub, trucking product to partner stores and to climate-controlled grocery lockers in communities without a store—allowing residents to order groceries online and access food locally.
Although Lori retired as NDAREC’s Rural Development Director in July 2024, she continues supporting NDAREC as a contractor, assisting with RAD replications and helping lay the groundwork for a $12.6 million Bush Foundation grant announced in 2025 to develop and test a regional grocery and local food hub in north central North Dakota.
This is innovation with measurable impact: RAD is being replicated in other rural counties, expanded through cross-state partnerships, and has influenced policy development, such as North Dakota’s first state appropriation in 2023 of $1 million for a rural grocery sustainability and food access expansion pilot grant program, which was approved again in 2025 for $1 million.
Lori doesn't take no for an answer. She keeps searching for answers and approaches that will work to strengthen North Dakota's rural grocery stores. In Lori Capouch, we see a leader who not only envisions a better future for grocery retail but actively works to make it a reality.