Delivering Solid, Consistent, Customer Service

Southeast Retailer (Mom): “2025 continued strong through the end of the year. There was a lull during the government shutdown in the fourth quarter. With my daughter taking over the business, there are so many good things happening. Her husband builds websites and is fluent with social media, so they’ve been doing a lot of very specific promotional campaigns, like reaching out to [the local] university people we don’t normally reach because we don’t use social media. 

“We’ve had a Facebook page forever but no consistent strategy with it. Now, they are doing consistent work, and I think we’re seeing benefits. We’ve implemented Instagram, so when you post on Facebook, it automatically goes to Instagram. Our followers there have gone from zero to 2,000 in just a couple of months. People are responding a lot to the posts, too, getting excited about the products we are highlighting. Our deli is driving a lot of business in the store, and we are getting a lot more sales and more traffic. And we’re seeing nice [Instagram] posts from customers for the deli. We recently promoted an in-store seminar with social media. While we don’t get the big crowds like 20 years ago, we did have 30 people recently. There’s a new energy coming into the store with my daughter, her husband, and my grandchildren all taking an interest. 

“While that’s only been the last two to three months, our overall growth has been consistent the whole year. There are just more people. After our 50 years of serving this community, I think they have finally caught up with the fact that there’s a good store in town. Our secret is our solid, consistent, customer service. You don’t get near the same kind elsewhere in town. We are one-on-one with customers when we can. When someone new comes in asking questions, we can walk them around the store, show them the products they’re interested in, and what we have. You can’t get that in a department store. And we are mindful in applying evergreen retail principles to our service. For example, we don’t have long lines at the register. We have three registers up front and one in the deli. Usually we run two registers, but if we get a little line, we’ll open up the third one. People really appreciate that.

“For 2026, I think we’re going to have growth. There’s a lot of interest in the food for sure. Groceries have been staying steady, with people eating better. Depending on the economy, in downturns, we’ve always done better, because people try to eat better. We’re in a secure place that way. Downturns don’t affect us the same as other less-essential businesses. We become more of a necessity than less. 

“We’re also trying to do better staff training. We’re known for education, but we have a lot of new, younger staff. We’re working hard to provide the depth of information they need, so they can make better decisions to guide the customers they need to help.”

Southeast Retailer (Daughter): “I’m gradually integrating into the business, and live about three hours away from the store, so I commute once a week, working at the store during the first day and part of the next day. I’m using my commute time to listen to audio books, which I’m loving!

“As we are moving through this transition legacy, I’m talking with staff about culture, keeping all the good with the store that has been solid, but also seeing how we as a collective can have more of an owners’ mentality, a collective strength. On a recent [American Express] Small Business Saturday (SBS), we were up 60% from the year-ago Saturday. And that Saturday each year there is also a big university football game day, when business can be slower. We posted the event on Instagram and Facebook. The local university has seen a lot of growth in the past couple of decades, and the changing population of students can be reached by stepping up our socials’ strategy. 

“On SBS, we raffled several vendor giveaway baskets; produce from local Community Supported Agriculture farms, and energy bites we created in our deli. We posted all of this on Instagram afterwards along with an education piece talking about what it means to be a local business. We emphasized what small businesses do when dollars stay in a local economy. We used statistics to illustrate the benefits of things like buying American, sustaining employment, supporting the arts, local radio stations and media, for example.

“The university TV station came to ask for an interview. That Instagram post has got more traffic than any other post over the past three months. Even though it feels like a social strategy, it is the real deal because we are demonstrating our values, our desire to grow our people, and provide forever homes for many. We are focusing on developing a pension plan and having individual development meetings with staff. We encourage our staff to think of working with us as a career, where we can build the business together. We covered the data part with key managers, discussed things like customer counts, average transaction size, and compared these to the last several years. We showed what it did to our numbers with SBS. This is critical because some of our long-term staff haven’t traditionally focused on data or on business trends.”

Breathing New Life Into the Store

Northeast Retailer: “I haven’t thought about 2026 yet, we’re just trying to survive 2025. I am curious about 2026, because 2025 has been really strong, with pretty easy growth for us, at both stores. I think the first half to three quarters of the year were stronger than the last three months, but the fourth quarter was still strong. Our strongest department growth has been in meat, which has been huge for us. We’ve also had growth in produce to some extent, but not as strong as meat. We’ve definitely seen growth in all perishables and grocery; not so much in supplements for us. I don’t know what the trend is there and haven’t spent too much time thinking about that. I think 2026 poses some challenges. There’s a hotel building project in our parking lot that I’m factoring in. Do I have anxiety towards that, or anxiety towards the year as a whole, not knowing what people expect? 

“There are so many small businesses in this tourist town, but it is a really changing community right now. The small business owners are aging out and selling off to big people; millionaires gobbling up properties and putting them under one umbrella. That’s concerning me a bit. Our town has always been a unique hodgepodge of local businesses. But it’s a changing landscape. Who are we catering to right now? Tourists who come into town seasonally with dollars make up a large part of our business, but I also want to make sure we cater to our locals that keep us going year-round. That’s something a lot of tourist communities are facing, I would think.

“It is almost impossible for people who work at the grocery store to live here anymore [due to the increased cost of housing]. How far do you drive to be a cashier? It is a concern. Are we going to have enough workers and locals to support us? We are not experiencing it right now, but I am anticipating the challenge. They are building hotels like crazy in town, going up anywhere and everywhere. They are trying to capitalize on the tourism, and not the local economy. That is the concern. 

“At the same time, the older generation of local residents has such a resistance to including people in their community that haven’t been here for generations. They say, You’re an out-of-state business. We’ve been here 25 years! Oh, you’re not a local, I get it. When do you become part of the community? 

“Our other inner-city store, I keep thinking we need to spend a little more effort. It is holding its own, and has had a strong year, month over month. And we are also seeing a lot more younger customers. For a long time, we mainly had a devoted older generation shopping regularly. Their average age is now 80. This year has changed dramatically, adding younger shoppers. We have a lot of new staff too, breathing new life into the store. I just hired a manager. So, it’s good. The store feels like it can be vibrant again.

“I’m trying to decide how to proceed there. We own the building along with the business. I’m trying to consider, is it revamping or thinking about investing into that? My husband and I are aging too, so we’re asking what the next 10 years look like in our lives. How do our kids play a role in that? That determines what we’ll do. 

“The store needs an overhaul. It’s been a long time since we’ve done anything. We are attracting a younger group to work and to shop and I feel it is our job to give them a younger, fresher store. It is really interesting that the younger generation is choosing to shop the smaller independents. They’re like, Oh, isn’t this nostalgic? They’d like something newer and updated. We don’t give this store the attention it deserves because our other store has grown so much in the last 10 years. I feel like it wants our attention. We’re up 11% and 7%, respectively, with a lot of increased foot traffic in both stores. What part is inflation; maybe 3% to 4%?” 

Cultivating an Ownership Mindset

Northwest Retailer: “I’m seeing the wellness industry incorporating fitness, biohacking and beauty, along with organic foods and supplements. In response, we’ve opened a separate Face Med Spa where we do facials, Botox, lasers, and retail skin care. I think many natural foods store owners would be shocked at how many customers use Botox! The stay-young biohacking technologies are an exploding industry. John Mackey [retired Whole Foods’ co-founder] is a principal in El Segundo, CA-based Love.Life, a biohacking facility offering nutritional food, a gym, cold plunge, red light therapy, pulse electromagnetic frequency, and a slew of pioneering technologies for improved health, and reducing inflammation. We’re introducing some of these into the face clinic, like natural bioidentical hormone therapy. You need a nurse practitioner or physician licensure for this, but for most biohacking there’s typically no license needed. There are some FDA-regulated devices. For example, hyperbaric chambers; there are certain pressures you can’t apply without a license. 

“We originally had an integrative holistic clinic inside our main store, but it was not profitable. We are also opening a separate gym with some of this technology. Fitness equipment with adaptive resistance, which is a motor that provides the resistance instead of weights. This improves efficiency and speed, so you can get a workout done faster. Also, we’re using the Vasper system equipment that restricts oxygen exposure during a cardio workout, so you can complete a one-and-a-half-hour routine in 10 minutes. It uses compression technology, liquid cooling and interval training. 

“The Med Face Spa is about equal in contribution to profits as our store. It takes a whole lot of food to make money! It took us 26 years to make the store as profitable as it is now. Looking back on 2025, the big thing was Trader Joe’s, which opened nearby in 2024, and instantly, our sales were up 17% overnight. That rapid growth rate faded, but we’ll still finish 2025 up in double digits. 

“We opened our off-site beverage production center last year, and we’re opening a separate kitchen this year to make more food for the store. We’re taking advantage of the [federal legislation] One Big Beautiful Bill effect, under which food qualifies as manufacturing as long as you are selling the production in a separate location. This is in effect from January 1, 2025, to December 31, 2029. If you build a building or renovate a facility that was not manufacturing, you can fully depreciate the real estate in one year, not 37 years as is typical. Instead of depreciating HVAC [heating, ventilation and air conditioning] over 10 years, you can immediately depreciate 100% of the expense. 

“So, we’re buying a building and renovating it, and depreciating it in one year. I’m planning a 4,000-square-foot commissary for 2026-2027. It will support the store, but by 2028, we’ll be positioned to do another couple of small stores, where 90% of the prepared foods are done elsewhere. I don’t want to do a $10 million [buildout cost] store. I’m thinking smaller-type stores that have a lot of prepared foods in them, a kind of expanded delicatessen with some center store merchandising. We’ll have a butcher, fresh produce, and center store, but it’ll be significantly smaller than our 25,000-square-foot main store. 

“Center store is your biggest vulnerability. When Amazon delivers by drones and robots do everything, it will be increasingly difficult to compete. With fresh prepared foods, there are more opportunities to create unique things, even though Amazon is in the category. A signature potato salad, for example. We’ve been focusing on these things for 10 years. We signify these in-house items with a sticker “MRH,” Made Right Here. I may have stolen that from Whole Foods years ago, I don’t know. 

“This year, perishables are growing more than center store, but that may be in part because Trader Joe’s is center store focused. Our meat, produce, prepared foods and chill, which includes dairy for us, are always strong. We can do raw milk in our state, so it’s a strong category for us. Center store grew at a slower pace, just single digits. The overall store grew in double digits. 

“For 2026, I think the things that make us unique will continue to drive growth. We will be opening an outdoor venue adjacent to our organic garden farm, with educational events, and arts and crafts for families. We’ll have Beer & Brat night, or an artisan pizza and beer night. We are now brewing beer. It took one and a half years to build it out in our beverage production center. The primary items we produce so far are cold pressed juices in bottles for grab and go, including our best seller; fresh pressed OJ. We also use botanically infused functional beverages; colas, root beers, in addition to the kombuchas, carbonated beverages, beers, and seltzers. The beverage center is 4,000 square feet. 

“Our business management strategy does cultivate an ownership mindset. We couldn’t do everything we are doing if we were control freaks. We’ve got an aggressive profit-sharing plan. The result is that our people treat the business as their own. We give them guardrails. It is open-book management, the kind championed by [Ann Arbor, Michigan-based retailer] Zingerman’s. I’m a big fan, too. Stores should be more open to it.”

Seeing MAHA as a Force for Long-Term Growth

West Coast Retailer: “I think the biggest force that will drive the industry’s long-term growth is MAHA [U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative]. With Kennedy at the helm, there’s a conscious effort going on in our industry’s direction. We’ve gained a lot of momentum from that, and we’ve picked up the energy on those coattails. 

“At the same time, the administration’s tariff regime challenges us. But the good work that Dan Fabricant [Ph.D., CEO of the Natural Products Association (NPA)] has done securing exemptions for many of our imported nutritional products has helped us maintain access without exorbitant price increases. We’ll have to be vigilant to maintain our industry’s interests during any efforts to update DSHEA [the federal 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act], but overall, we have a bright future, despite some dents and dings along the way.

“For 2025, we more than held our own, with overall sales up 10% in 2025 over 2024, even with closing one of our stores. I feel like the world is starting to listen to what we have to say. Mushrooms continue to make their way. It cracks me up, but it is a stronghold for us. Those companies are pushing quality. That is in contrast to what is going on with Amazon and the whole third party-vendor quality scandals. It was a wakeup call for us as an industry. But it showed the worth of brick-and-mortar; our ability to control quality. You guys [Amazon] can’t control it. We’ve been doing this for 50 years! Being small gives you a place to start, to be able to know your vendors, so that’s huge. I believe our future is bright!”

My Thoughts: Reducing Friction, Relinquishing Control

As marketers such as Amazon, Kroger and others continue to shrink the time and reduce the friction between order and delivery, independent natural products retailers may feel pressure to adopt similar tactics. These may be efficient in one sense—shortening the order/delivery time. But, for independents that must rely on third parties to execute each tactic, this inserts an external service provider between the retailer and the customer, forcing retailers to forgo full control of the relationship. 

Even Amazon has likely suffered the consequences of introducing Prime delivery into its Whole Foods Markets division. Any growth in delivering Prime orders out of Whole Foods’ stores has probably come at the expense of new foot traffic into them. We believe in-store sales have remained flat since Amazon’s 2017 acquisition, with Prime deliveries effectively converting the stores into extravagant fulfillment warehouses, pulling orders from the retail shelves of some of the most expensive real estate in the world. And it is widely understood that post-acquisition, the culture of knowledge and quality that once set Whole Foods apart from its competitors has been severely diluted.

With Amazon’s continuing struggles to find the right bricks-and-mortar formula, in August, Amazon launched same-day grocery delivery in 2,300 cities nationwide. Over the last few months, the company has raised its perishables delivery assortment by 30%, including Whole Foods’ items. Touting its success, CEO Andy Jassy said the service is changing the U.S. tradition of the weekly grocery stock-up shopping trip. We can assume this means by breaking shopping into smaller, more frequent orders delivered home.

Omnichannel: The Holy Grail?

Grocery industry advisers counsel retailers to adopt an anywhere, anytime approach to delivering products to customers; online e-commerce, through a dedicated app, on the website, via social media, and in-store at the shelf, at the register, and for pick-up and delivery home. The customer expects these moving parts to harmonize the same inventory, availability, pricing, and loyalty earnings. For the retailer, the challenge is maintaining profit margins, managing orders, keeping a single product file, unifying customer profiles and award status, and coordinating promotional activity.

The two largest retailers, Walmart and Amazon, can afford to develop these capabilities in-house. But even the $150 billion behemoth Kroger still depends on third-party delivery services like Instacart, Door Dash, and Uber to provide some of these services. For the rest of the grocery universe, smaller retailers must glue these pieces together with hardware, software and services from multiple vendors, foiling any hope of the customer receiving a consistent experience across every channel.

To Compete or Not to Compete?

This raises two questions: Can you afford to compete on this battlefield, and should you try? Fortunately, there is enough wisdom, creativity, and ingenuity among successful independents to encourage you to re-embrace your mission and values and go forth and grow. 

Prepared & Perishables Foods

Prepared foods, done well, can act as a private-label lock on customer demand. As our Northwest retailer stated above, they have been developing and refining signature dishes such as potato salad for 10 years. A menu with even a few unique recipes can drive consistent traffic and insulate you from larger competitors with bigger kitchens. Filling out your perimeter offerings with produce, proteins, and dairy also increases the magnetism of your fresh assortment, helping ensure frequent shopping trips.

Private Label

There are several good vitamin brands who remain loyal to the independent channel, but several more who’ve pledged and then rescinded their commitment. It makes business sense to not put all your vitamin eggs in other’s baskets and to reserve some shelf space for your private label line of supplements. In addition to insulating you from losses when brands defect, private label extends your reach into the pantries of your customers, increasing the chances they’ll return to you again and again.  

Personal Attention, Better Pay

As our Southeast retailer states above, walking new customers through the aisles, shortening checkout lines, and thoroughly training nutrition staff to improve the quality of their recommendations all add up to superior service unduplicable in other channels. And as several retailers share, sweetening employee compensation can pay long-term benefits to your business.

Participate

Finally, as our West Coast retailer tells us, it is an act of self-preservation to support your regional and national industry associations that tirelessly work to secure your access to natural products and your right to tell your customers about them. WF