Photo by Mark Wagoner

It’s a good thing the people of Greensboro love their city. Otherwise, The Fresh Market might not be here.

The chairman and co-founder of the specialty grocery-store chain, Ray Berry, can’t recall who struck up a conversation with him and his family when they passed through town in the early 1980s. But he remembers what the stranger said.

“If you’re looking for a place to settle, look no further,” said the stranger. “Greensboro is the place to be.”

The message stuck with Berry, who had been visiting cities all over the Southeast in search of a place to start a new business. He just left his job as vice president of the Southland Corporation in Dallas, where he oversaw 3,600 7-11 convenience stores. Greensboro was one of several places he and his family were thinking of moving to.

“We looked at Atlanta, Columbia, Asheville, Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Raleigh, Charlottesville, Roanoke, and Greensboro,” Berry recalls. “We spent a day in each town and liked Greensboro, so we came back here.”

The stranger’s boosterism sealed the deal for the family.

“We checked into a hotel and stayed there for about two months while I was trying to find a site for a store,” Berry says. “We had a seventh-grader and a ninth-grader that we had to get in school, so there was some time pressure. We couldn’t just lollygag around.”

Berry bought the old Bi-Rite store on Lawndale Avenue and he and his wife, Beverly, opened the first Fresh Market store in 1982. In March of this year, that location finally closed to make way for a bigger and brighter store next door.

It was a bittersweet moment for the Berrys. The original store was the start of what is now a thriving business with 78 locations in 17 states. But the new one reflects how bright the future is.

HONEST FOOD, HONEST PEOPLE

Food lovers in Greensboro must feel as if life before The Fresh Market was like living without the Internet. How did anyone manage?

But they did, by shopping mostly at large, one-stop-shop supermarkets. Grocery shopping back then felt more like a chore, which is why Berry began researching niche grocers in Dallas and California that were doing things differently.

“I thought there was an opportunity to put together a concept that just had food,” Berry says. “I wanted to set up a market concept where you go around and talk to different people in different parts of the store about different foods as you plan your menu.”

The inspiration may have been grocers he visited here, but the look and feel he wanted was very European. Many Italians, French, and Spaniards still visit bakeries, butchers, produce markets, and other specialty stores for their groceries. Berry created that feel under one roof.

“For years we had nothing but food,” he says. “We had a few canned items, but no aluminum foil. No soap. No toiletries. We didn’t have anything like that.”

Now, of course, The Fresh Market does carry a small assortment of non-grocery items for the convenience of its customers. “But that’s not where our strong suit is,” Berry says. “We’re still primarily fresh food.”

Berry’s concept worked almost immediately. And there was something else: All the customers who were steadily coming through the door were — and still are — pleasant to deal with.

“It’s almost like we screen people, and if you’re not nice you can’t shop here,” jokes Berry. “It’s probably the way the store feels. It’s also being able to interact with employees when you come in so you don’t feel isolated.”

Berry says customers also appreciate the honesty they get from Fresh Market employees. If a certain kind of fish has been shipped frozen instead of fresh, for instance, the worker at the seafood counter will say so. Honesty is at the heart of Berry’s business philosophy.

“You’ve got to be honest with everyone — your employees, the shareholders, the suppliers, and the customers,” Berry says. “Most businesses like to keep things secret that don’t need to be kept secret. We just don’t do that.”

If you ask Berry the secret to The Fresh Market’s success, he’ll say it’s no secret at all. It’s his employees and the food.

FOODS FROM NEAR AND FAR

Nearly three decades after it opened, The Fresh Market’s reputation is still staked on its fresh foods. Berry says the company acquires its own meats and has them shipped fresh from all around the world. The company is nimble enough to make changes whenever appropriate.

“We recently switched to a grass-fed Australian lamb we can now get fresh,” Berry says. “For years it was frozen from Australia. But this lamb is outstanding.”

The produce is colorful and almost uniformly perfect, with signage telling shoppers exactly where it came from. Often, it didn’t travel very far.

“We have set up arrangements with local farmers, like Pressley Farms near Southern Pines,” says Bob King, regional vice president of operations. “They supply strawberries and deliver directly to our stores here in Greensboro.”

The bakery also has a local touch.

“We sell Ganache cakes,” King says. “Mark Smith is the owner, and he contacted us and went through negotiations. We sell them as Ganache Bakery cakes. It’s a great arrangement.”

Greensboro stores also sell decadent poundcakes from The Pound Cake Company in Benson. “It’s expensive, but it’s the most wonderful poundcake in the world,” King says. “[Owner Jan Matthews-Hodges] has this great facility, so we asked if she could do more for us. Now she’s doing garlic knots, too.”

Local ties with farmers, bakers, and other vendors such as Drake’s Fresh Pasta Company in High Point and granola maker Little Red Wagon in Chapel Hill help increase the likelihood of freshness in stores and further set The Fresh Market apart from larger grocery chains.

So do many of the packaged foods shipped from beyond the region. For instance, the candy section includes a bacon chocolate bar from Vosges Haut Chocolat — certainly not an everyday item. The dairy case features a number of exotic yogurts from places like Greece and Switzerland.

Anyone who’s enjoyed a piece of ginger cake at New York’s Tea & Sympathy will be thrilled to find single-serving ginger cakes from The Sticky Toffee Pudding Co. in Austin, Texas. And staying with the British theme, the condiments aisle includes Britain’s ubiquitous HP Sauce.

These and other distinctive food items make shopping The Fresh Market feel like a food adventure.

ALL IN THE FAMILY

Employees seem to enjoy themselves along with their customers. When King is asked about this, he agrees. Then he points to different employees around the new Lawndale Avenue location.

“In this store, the meat manager has been here for 20 years,” he explains. “The deli manager has been here 22 years. We have a lot of long-term employees. This is a family organization that cares about its employees. Everyone believes they have a stake in the company because of the way we’re treated.”

And Berry says it’s all about honesty and respect.

“We found that if you treat people with respect and expect a lot out of them, you end up with great employees,” he says. “We try to treat them all well, because they’re the ones who interact with our customers. They’re the ones who matter. It doesn’t matter much what I do anymore.”

That’s untrue, of course, but Berry does share more of the workload now. His son, Brett, is the company’s president and CEO. And his son-in-law, Mike Berry, is vice chairman, executive vice president, and CFO. They’re all in the office every day, along with Beverly, working together.

It’s hard to believe now, but Berry says family made him think twice about starting The Fresh Market.

“I worried because a lot of data indicates that business ends up coming before family,” he says. “My wife and I talked about that a lot. We decided it just wasn’t going to happen and it hasn’t. If the family starts to have issues, the business goes away, not the family. We try to keep those priorities straight.”

Still, they are family. How do they keep from driving each other crazy?

“We have fun,” Berry says. “We try to not talk business at home, and we don’t talk a lot of family at work.”

The arrangement has been good. Both the family and the business are as strong as ever. Meanwhile, Berry says other businesses have tried to replicate The Fresh Market model and haven’t been able to.

“Whole Foods is probably our closest competitor,” Berry says. “I think they do a terrific job with what they do, but they’re different. And both of us draw from a wide area, much wider than a typical supermarket draws from. So we affect each other, but not tremendously.”

BRANCHING OUT, BUT STAYING PUT

With expansion surging into the Midwest and further South, The Fresh Market could conceivably pick up and move to a place like Chicago to be closer to its growth areas.

But Berry says when the company established its current strategy several years ago, it entrenched itself in Greensboro even more.

“Seven or eight years ago, we were adding a store or two or three annually,” Berry says. “You don’t have to add a lot of people. But now we’re growing our store base at an average of 20 percent a year, and we need a lot of people in our office to maintain that.”

Berry ticks off a laundry list of personnel the company has added over the past few years, ranging from real-estate professionals to marketers to IT experts. Now, the central office has 180 employees, many of whom moved here for their jobs.

“When we started to recruit, we found that Greensboro is a great place for young families,” Berry says. “And recently we’ve recruited a lot of young professionals who are single. They like the laid-back, easy pace of Greensboro. They enjoy the quality of life.”

By attracting all these people here, Berry is simply returning the favor to that one stranger who insisted he and his family should set down roots.

He has an easier case to make, too, now that he can say the city has six great specialty grocery stores that make food shopping a pleasure.