Walking through the aisles of his grocery store in Brooklyn, New York, Alap Vora points to a box of breakfast cereal.
He says he paid roughly $5 (£3.75) to his distributor to get the pack of Honey Bunches of Oats onto the shelf.
But his much larger rivals, the big US supermarket chains, can sell that same box for around $5 - essentially, the price he has to pay wholesale.
That dynamic makes it "impossible for us to compete", says Vora, 40, who opened Concord Market, nestled on a busy Brooklyn intersection, in 2009.
"Some of our competitors, obviously the larger chains and the larger big-box stores - they have direct relationships with manufacturers. They have preferred pricing," Vora says.
