National chain with homegrown focus opens in Columbia Thursday
Long stretches of sleek, recycled wood set the background to patio dining and a corner café, peppered with turquoise and bright yellow seating. Mothers, professionals and the retired couple lunched on spreads of fresh-churned almond butter and crisp green salads, sprinkled with City Roots microgreens.
A makeshift fish market sat at the front of the parking lot, weighing and filleting 1,200 pounds of wild sockeye salmon for $4.99 a pound (regularly $7.99), and pyramids of the perfect pumpkins and flowering Pelee mums stood guard just outside the front doors.
Columbia’s Whole Foods Market, in the new Cross Hill Shopping Center, opened Thursday with an 8:30 a.m. “bread breaking” and a day of clustered, congested and completely chaotic excitement.
The Columbia location is South Carolina’s third, with Whole Foods Markets in both Charleston and Greenville, and holds to the chain’s local ideal: local products, local vendors and local staff.
The capital’s store shelves 220 local products, and the bulk of the 140 employees are from Columbia, according to store manager Jeff Campbell.
But how local is local?
The blanket Whole Foods definition of local says a product can’t travel more than a day, or seven hours, to its home store. Each of the chain’s 11 regions then have individual standards that usually tighten that requirement.
In Columbia, the food and products labeled “local” are from South Carolina, Campbell said, and when possible, from the city. “Regional” items come from the state’s outskirts in North Carolina and Georgia.
Columbia’s is also the most locally focused of all of the South Carolina stores, housing the most state and regional products, Campbell said.
Familiar labels are flagged throughout the store. City Roots microgreens grace the shelves of produce and sit in the make-your-own salad bar, and Rawl Farms, of Pelion, S.C., stocks tomatoes and other fresh produce. Snack-sized bags of Cromer’s P-Nuts sit next to the checkout aisles.
Whole Foods held a local vendor fair in December to scout out the city and state’s organic and homegrown gems. Campbell said the store also took suggestions opening day for other overlooked products and vendors.
Misty Rawls, the owner of Just Wanna Melt, was at the opening Thursday, handing out samples of her homemade lotion bars and body scrubs. Each of her products is made from South Carolina beeswax — she melts together wax from Clayton Rawl Farms in Lexington and Bell Honey Company — and carried in 28 stores throughout the state.
This is her first time on Whole Foods shelves, though.
When she was just starting her business, about three years ago, she would bring her products to the Healthy Carolina Farmers Market. Her labels “looked awful,” and she ended up recruiting a USC student, Kelly Parker, to design her entire brand — from labels to marketing materials and website. Parker now works as a graphic designer for a nonprofit organization in Maryland.
Clad in a pea green polka-dot apron, Rawl bagged penny-sized pieces of lotion bars and offered advice on personal grooming techniques.
Just a few aisles over, lunch-break students and professionals snaked through self-serve bars and deli counters.
There were slices of pizza, chicken wings, brown rice sushi rolls and a sandwich bar.
Each sandwich was aptly named after one of Columbia’s neighborhoods: the Shandon Special, Saluda Steak & Cheese and Five Points Garden Grill. The Vista layered oven-roasted turkey, a fig spread, brie and a spring mix for $7.99.
Savannah Bock, a senior at A.C. Flora High School, took a quick off-campus lunch break Thursday afternoon. She checked off each of her favorites on the create-your-own sandwich menu and ogled at the store-deep row of prepared foods.
The Whole Foods staff is also chock-full of Columbia natives, with quite a few coming from competing grocers in the area.
Pedro Pinckney, the store’s produce manager, had been the longtime producer manager at the Devine Street Bi-Lo, just across the street from the new market.
Campbell said many of the new Whole Foods employees made the move because of the company’s competitive salaries and benefits package — the chain has been voted to Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” the last 15 years.
The hope is to encourage the same pay and benefits across the city.
“Others will have to raise their bar,” Campbell said.
But Pinckney said his move was part of a bigger mission as well.
He’s excited about the direction Whole Foods is moving in and is impressed with the store’s commitment to protecting the environment. There’s also the local flair.
“There’s not one (Whole Foods) that’s the same,” Pinckney said. “Every store has different characteristics — they really try to mirror the community.”
The community grocery chain — combining the finds of a local farmers market with the scale of a mass stock — opened two miles down the road from Rosewood Market. The smaller-scale market has been a mainstay for local markets for almost 40 years and helped pioneer Columbia’s local movement.
Campbell, the new Whole Foods manager, knows it. He worked at Rosewood Market, and he said he loves the owner, Basil Garzia, and recognizes the merit of the tucked-away market.
“It’s been entrenched in the community for so long, and they do what they do so well,” Campbell said. “What we do is just on a larger scale.”
Garzia agrees, and he’s excited to see a growing focus on going local, in all its forms.
“A rising tide lifts all boats,” Garzia said.