Inside a sparkling supermarket in West Philadelphia, top members of the Obama administration gathered with local officials and activists yesterday to hail efforts to increase the number of supermarkets in underserved parts of the city.

The secretaries of agriculture and commerce, as well as other federal officials, toured the Parkside ShopRite store, which opened in 2007 on 52d Street near Parkside Avenue, and lauded it as an example of what community partnerships with government can accomplish.

Adolfo Carrion, the director of the White House Office of Urban Affairs, praised the Parkside ShopRite and the Fresh Food Financing Initiative, a state program that combines state and private money. He also noted the efforts of nonprofit organizations to build food markets across Pennsylvania.

"This is an example of an integrated approach to problem-solving," Carrion said of the initiative.

Carrion was joined on the market tour by Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Mayor Nutter, State Rep. Dwight Evans, and others. They later held a panel discussion on developing supermarkets in urban areas.

Jeff Brown, owner of the Parkside store and 10 other ShopRite markets in and around Philadelphia, said it was gratifying to have his store recognized as an urban model.

"For a person that measures his success in life based on improvements in society, this is a great day for us," Brown said.

He said that the Parkside store was designed in cooperation with the community, noting that the store offers locally grown produce and that it has a second meat department that has beef and chicken produced in accordance with Muslim religious standards.

Brown said his stores employ 2,600 unionized workers, many of whom live in the communities where they work.

Lucinda Hudson, executive director of the Parkside Association, a community organization, said her group had worked for several years to have a supermarket built at the site.

"This community had been redlined by banks and supermarkets," Hudson said.

She said that working with the Fresh Food Financing Initiative to build the ShopRite helped improve the community.

"The thing we were looking for was a better quality of life for the community," Hudson said. "This has helped."

Nutter said it took a long time to get a market built at the Parkside location.

"We talked to every major supermarket chain in the country about building on this site," Nutter said.

Yael Lehmann, executive director of the Food Trust, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit organization that works to improve access to healthy, affordable food and to educate families about nutrition, said a study in the 1990s found that Philadelphia had the second lowest number of supermarkets per capita.

Lehmann said the initiative was "incredibly positive, because we know that the neighborhoods that people live in have a dramatic impact on their health.

"So if you live in a neighborhood where you don't have any options ... or grocery stores that offer fresh foods, you are going to end up eating foods that aren't good for you; that's going to negatively impact your health."

Officials said the initiative has helped develop eight stores in Philadelphia. Six are open and two others will open this year.

Lehmann said the initiative started after the food trust developed a map showing which neighborhoods did not have supermarkets.

A 2001 study showed that neighborhoods that lacked supermarkets had "incredibly high rates of diet-related death an disease," Lehmann said.