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GOURMET NEWS DECEMBER 2019 www.gourmetnews.com RETAILER NEWS 8 Food Retailers Continued from PAGE 7 Cheese, Meet Cave We talked next to Marnie Clarke, co- Owner of Cheese Cave in Claremont, Cal- ifornia. She and her sister and fellow co-Owner, Lydia Clarke, were in Finland visiting their brother Noah Clarke, a pro- fessional hockey player, when the two started discussing Marnie's reservations about her job as a cheesemaker for Win- chester Cheese Company. It wasn't that she didn't like making the cheese – Marnie grew up in a dairy family, representing the dairy started by her grand- father Harold Stueve at natural food shows and helping out with the chores around the farm. When she'd landed the job as a cheesemaker, she'd thought she'd found her own career within that world. "I totally thought that was the route I was going to go down," she said. But then she'd found that she didn't like the early mornings, and she didn't like the loneliness. She wanted more connections with people, she started telling her older sister in 2007 or so. "My sister and I have always been very close," Marnie said. "We knew that at some point in our lives, we were going to do something together." While the two were in Finland visiting their brother, who was there after he'd been traded from his Swiss team, Marnie con- fided her uncertainties about the direction of her career, and they talked about how Marnie was living in southern California, while her sister was way up in Napa. "I wanted her to come back down to southern California," Marnie said. By the end of the trip, Marnie and Lydia had figured out a so- lution that made them both happy – a cheese shop that they'd run together. "Our original business plan was that we were going to be two sisters running the shop by ourselves, and we'd become little old ladies doing the same thing," Marnie said. In 2010, they opened Cheese Cave in Claremont, a clean little 13 square-mile community between San Bernardino and Los Angeles, California, with a popula- tion of 36,000 people living in half-mil- lion dollar houses under enough trees to make the city a perennial winner of the National Arbor Day Association's Tree City USA award and 21 city-owned parks, of which 2,378 acres are wilderness. "It's a very cute community, we knew we wanted to be in Claremont from the start," Marnie said. The plan to be two sisters running their 1,100 square-foot cheese shop for- ever and ever lasted a matter of weeks. The community embraced them and their shop, and Marnie and Lydia needed an- other employee within the first couple of months after opening their doors. Then they needed a few more. The customers started asking them about accouterments for their cheese plates and then for the tinned fish, the pasta, the olive oil that they needed to round out their meal plans. "People really came to us when they needed or wanted something," Marnie said. "We've become the go-to purveyors for peo- ple who are interested in food." Asian Food Markets Grows in New Jersey In May, Gourmet News an- nounced that Asian Food Markets, a chain of grocery stores focusing on East Asian packaged, fresh and prepared food, had signed a lease for a 43,152-square-foot anchor space at Plainsboro Plaza Shopping Center in Plainsboro, New Jersey. Asian Food Markets was founded in 1992 with a single location in Edison, New Jer- sey, and has expanded throughout New Jer- sey. The company currently operates five locations in Jersey City, North Plainfield, Piscataway, Marlboro and Plainsboro. IT'SUGAR a Fun Fantasy for Adults The June issue of Gourmet News took us to IT'SUGAR, a specialty candy retailer with more than 100 stores scattered across the U.S. IT'SUGAR shops are fantasies in which adults can recapture the fun of child- hood while enjoying guilty pleasures spiced with a smidgeon of temptation. They're a world in which children are wel- come, but they're not the primary market for the thrills that are offered. "It's a much more modern version of a traditional candy shop," said Jeff Rubin, the chain's Founder and Chief Executive Officer. "We're creat- ing a theater to im- merse you in the humor, in the fun experience of our store, so that you have a very enter- taining time while you're in our store.... We can ob- viously satisfy a sweet tooth, but more importantly, we were put on Earth to provide an irrev- erent escape from the mundane world." "We have created a store that makes you laugh, smile and enjoy yourself," he con- tinued. "When you've finished dinner at one of the entertainment vendors, you get hit with music and these funny products. You find yourself walking out with some- thing you didn't even know you needed." Native Sun Purveys Wellness In the July issue of Gourmet News, we in- troduced you to Native Sun Natural Foods Market, with three locations in Jack- sonville, Florida, where Chief Executive Officer Aaron Gottlieb is striving to be more than a grocer. Responding to heavy competition among local brick-and-mortar grocery retailers as well as looming compe- tition from e-commerce, Gottlieb is trans- forming Native Sun into a wellness center that works with other businesses to lower their health insurance costs and offer their employees extra bene- fits. "Today, brick and mortar – and retail in general – have changed faster than most retailers can adapt to," Gottlieb said. "While that can be nerve-racking, it creates white space in new areas of wellness to go into." Gottlieb, a graduate of Emory University with a degree in an- thropology, was born and raised in Jack- sonville, Florida, and opened his first Native Sun store there in the city's Mandarin neigh- borhood in 1997. He was already a convert to the idea that nutrition and wellness are intimately related, and he opened his store as Jacksonville's original natural and organic gro- cer. "Before that, there wasn't organic milk or organic produce," he said. "We believed you could have an organic market." Native Sun now car- ries no genetically mod- ified products, and products are organic whenever the organic option is available at a non-prohibitive cost. "Otherwise, clean and natural," Gottlieb said. Consumers see the organic produce de- partment as soon as they walk into the store. The next thing they're likely to notice is the signs that confirm the store's local outreach, both for its supply chain and for its relationships with its shopper commu- nity. "In addition to that, we have the or- ganic juice bar in the front of the store," Gottlieb said. "Smoothies create interest in the department. It makes nice smells. It helps the experience that the consumers are having when they're shopping organic." Garden Gourmet Stays Local Tucked in among the restaurants on the Wicker Park neighborhood side of Divi- sion Street, Garden Gourmet offers Chicago, Illinois, commuters a taste of fresh and local in an easy stop on their way home from the nearby subway sta- tion. Inside the 2,500 square-foot space, they find abundant choices for craft beers and wines; fresh, organic produce; IT'SUGAR CHEESE CAVE

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