Green Gourmet market owners 

transcribed by Brandon Carter
Coastal Journal Staff

The way it all came about was we both moved to Maine with the intention of opening something together, not necessarily a food store, but something.  It was put on hold for awhile because we had children and jobs and money to deal with, but I would pass this building everyday on my way to work, and I thought, “This place would make a great natural foods market.”  I brought it up to Jess one day, and we decided to go look at it since it was for sale.

It was like a light bulb went off.  We both thought, “We have to do this.”  Long story short, we decided to pursue it.  We drew up a plan, took it to the bank, they loved it, and everything started falling into place. 

So here we are; we sold our house and moved in upstairs.  It was a retail space before, but we’ve turned it into an apartment.  We’ve done some work on the building, it has new floors, the outside, everything is basically new.
We’ve been open for four weeks now and it’s going really well.  We’ve had a great response from the community, people seem excited that we’re here.  It’s important to us to try to support our community, especially local farmers.  We have their produce, we have milk from local farmers, our coffee is from Maine, a lot of our cheese is from Maine, sausage, the pie guy was just here.  But we’re trying really hard not to have any crossover between our products and our competition’s.  We try not buy the same wine as, say, the little wine shop here in Wiscasset, because we want everybody to prosper, we’d like to see small businesses thrive.  Hopefully that happens.

We’re both really into good food, we like to share our passion for it, and we want to bring in products that you don’t necessarily see everywhere.  We were both raised with healthy habits, so we want to continue that tradition in our family, which is a challenge in this day and age.

The two of us met in college, out west.  I was going to school in Washington, he was living in Portland, Oregon.  We met through friends and we both ended up finishing school at the University of Arizona in Tucson:  I dragged him to Tucson, and then I dragged him to Maine.

I grew up in Maine until I was fifteen, when I went to live with my dad in Arizona.  I would come back every year in the summer.  It was always home, and I always knew I wanted to raise a family here.  It was just a matter of when.  Really, it’s just very cool to live in a small town in Maine, we’re already finding that we’re getting to know our community just by people dropping into the store.  You don’t get that everywhere.

We’ve faced a host of challenges, from our computer crashing and losing all the inventory we’d been working on for amonth, to trying to keep our menu exciting for people from week to week.  But it’s been especially hard having our kids here.  They’re both very energetic boys, and they like to go through and eat all the food and destroy all the displays.  We have to try and keep a division between our space and the store, so when they’re here one of us is always with them.  We have to watch them every second because they’re little and like to dash, and we live on a very busy road.  There’s also the jail next door.  We don’t feel threatened by it, but you do want to watch your children closely if there are criminals next door. 

Our long term goal is to eventually move out of the apartment and turn our upstairs into an office, for one, but we’d also like to have cooking classes and demonstrations and that sort of thing.  We’d like to try and set up a farmer’s market next summer; the closest are in Brunswick or Damariscotta, so we’re asking some farmers, if they have the time, to try selling their products directly.  Eventually, we’d like to expand the store, make a larger deli and a larger natural foods market, too.  But that’s a few years down the road.  

We’re foodies, so that’s the kind of service we wanted to bring to this community.  We really felt that there was a need for a place where you could get local produce, local food, good things to cook with, and a good place to just stop in and grab a sandwich or a cup of soup.  People are always complaining there’s no place to get a cup of soup around here.  Well there is now.