If the McIntosh man was unsure in the produce section of Central Market, he’d be completely lost in the groves of Wolcott, N.Y. October is harvest month here, five miles south of Lake Ontario, in a region that supplies half of the state’s apple crop.
“Do you know how to pick an apple?” Lee Peters asks me as he turns off the dirt road and parks next to a row of apple trees. The field hands have the hang of it. They work in teams of threes and fours, filling wooden crates with Crispins, a cross between Golden Delicious and Japanese Indo.
Peters is head of sales and marketing for Fowler Farms, one of the nation’s leading growers of premium apples and a primary supplier to Texas-based food emporium Central Market. This year Central Market will purchase more than 1 million pounds of apples from Fowler, in 12 varieties, every one picked by hand. Before I reach for a Crispin, which looks like a big Granny Smith, I complain that Fowler’s apple trees don’t look like apple trees. They look like bushes. “That’s a common reaction,” Peters says. “We tell people that we’re growing apples, not trees.”
The trees are planted close together, 17 to 24 inches apart, 2,000 to 3,000 to an acre. They’re attached to trellises and are lopped off 6 feet high. The system was developed in Germany to increase crop yields but the yields didn’t increase. However, the quality and consistency of the apples soared. “This way we’ve always got apples growing on new wood,” Peters explains. “The fewer apples per tree, the larger they tend to grow.”
I select an apple and prepare to pull when Peters stops me. “Here,” he says. “This is how you do it.” He cradles the apple in the palm of his hand and lifts it up, tilting it slightly. The Crispin lets go without a sound. “This way we don’t bruise the fruit,” he says. “Pickers are paid based on the quality of apples picked, not quantity. Every box we ship can be tracked back to who picked it, even the soil condition.”
Central Market manages hundreds of relationships with growers, manufacturers, and purveyors every bit as fastidious as Fowler. Central Market is a wholly owned subsidiary of H-E-B Grocery Company of San Antonio, an $8 billion a year, family-owned food retailer. H-E-B is the 12th largest grocery chain in the United States, operating 282 stores in Texas, Louisiana, and Mexico. It is run by Charles Butt, grandson of the company’s founder, Florence Butt. When he took over day-to-day management in 1971, sales were $250 million and the company employed 4,500 people. Today Central Market employs 50,000.
In 1992, Charles acquired a tract of land on North Lamar in Austin that he thought deserved a food store along the lines of Harry’s Farmers Market in Atlanta, Fairway Market in Manhattan, or Stew Leonard’s in Connecticut. He was familiar with the complaints that customers have expressed about typical grocery stores: long, straight aisles; stores cluttered with drug stores and banks; hospital-quality baked goods; and employees who know more about Emmitt Smith than Emeril Lagasse. Charles handed the land and the project to company veteran John Campbell with a curious caution: “Be careful hiring grocery people, or you’ll get a grocery store.”
Evidently Campbell took the caution seriously. At the newly opened Fort Worth Central Market, almost every department manager I met came from somewhere other than a grocery store. The specialty grocery manager, from Astoria, Queens, despite any formal retailing experience, was quite capable of explaining the intricacies of raspberry chipotle or Woebers Mustard. She trained at the French Culinary Institute in New York and put in stints at The Mozzarella Company and Empire Bakery. The fish department manager grew up on a trout farm and later worked in seafood restaurants in Austin and Houston. For a time, he worked at a shrimp farm on the Gulf Coast.
I meet Campbell at the Fort Worth Central Market a few weeks after the store entertained record crowds and an energetic fire marshal. Campbell is a perpetual motion machine and handy with witticisms. When he speaks, his hands carve the air. It’s difficult to believe he was ever an accountant. “When we started Central Market,” he tells me, “I didn’t know the difference between yeast and sawdust.”
He learned fast. In preparation for the Austin Central Market, which opened in 1994, Campbell built a prototype store in a warehouse. It was there that his team selected products and the “forced flow” store layout, which is also employed by Stew Leonard’s and Harry’s Farmers Market. Unlike a traditional grocery store design—aisles opening to the registers—a forced-flow layout requires shoppers to follow a prescribed path through every department. In-and-out shoppers are forced to locate unmarked shortcuts to abbreviate the experience.
The Austin Central Market, forced flow and all, was an immediate hit in spite of the warnings of grocery consultants who told Campbell that he had better sell conventional items like Diet Coke and Tide or else. I ask Campbell how long it took for him to become secure that the Central Market concept would prosper in a margin-thin industry. Traditionally, grocery stores average a 1-2 percent profit. Central Market improves on that margin but at the risk of increased overhead. Its stores must record weekly sales of at least $800,000—three times a conventional grocery store—just to break even. “I’m always afraid,” Campbell tells me, “of creeping mediocrity. These things are tough, tough, tough, to run. Half this store is a manufacturing plant.”
If half of the approximately $14 million stores—exclusive of real estate and inventory—are manufacturing plants, the other half are classrooms. This point is often lost in the ritual re-publishing of Central Market shelf counts: 700 varieties of produce, 600 kinds of cheese, 2,500 domestic and imported wines, 80 kinds of fresh fish. After a while the numbers get to you. In fact, they may be more of a deterrent to potential shoppers than an enticement—if you don’t know what kind of tomato sauce you need, 30 choices don’t help. But Central Market is not solely about depth or breadth of inventory. The now-defunct GroceryWorks had inventory. It even had little trucks to deliver it to doorsteps. Central Market is about exploration, education, and soft selling.
In every department, all day long, employees offer free samples and explain the differences between various products. In Fort Worth, there’s a cooking demonstration set up near the meat and fish departments and a 50-seat cooking school offering nightly classes on the second floor. (The Plano and Dallas Central Markets will follow the same basic design. Plano opens in February, Dallas in early summer.) At times, especially when it’s crowded, Central Market has the giddy feel of the food pavilion at the State Fair. Its genius is to give customers what they ask for—Kraft Mustard, for instance—then, and only then, does a Central Market employee offer a free taste of something better.
By the end of last summer, only the signs were left at the southeast corner of Lovers Lane and Greenville Avenue to suggest the favor Stephen Butt was doing Dallas by scraping the place clean. (The Plano store will be at the northeast corner of Coit Road and the George Bush Turnpike.) The sign for the 1st and 10 Sports Bar was still standing, as was the sign for the Saloon Men’s Club, which bore the additional, if obscure, message “Special Nights: 6, 2, 10.” The Aladdin Car Wash, the worst car wash in town, continued to offer a hand wax for $39.95 in spite of the fact that its roof trusses were bulldozed into a pile and ringed with yellow caution tape. The Hunan Chinese Restaurant, asphalt and gravel where the dining room used to be, advertised a “Super Buffet and Free Delivery,” and warned of nasty consequences for trespassers. Finally, Le Bare, the 1980s parlor for sporting bachelorettes, tried, with too few letters, to direct revelers to the new location.
Dallas and Fort Worth have long been a void in H-E-B’s regional hegemony. The closest the company got was Ennis. “We’ve seriously talked about Dallas for 20 years,” Stephen tells me as we stand on a second floor balcony of the Fort Worth Central Market. “We wanted the right time in the company’s cycle.” Below us customers circle the prepared foods section. Stephen is a nephew of Charles Butt. (The only other family member with an operating role in H-E-B is Stephen’s brother Howard, who manages 20 H-E-B stores in Mexico. Charles Butt has no children). In his career, Stephen has progressed from managing a single H-E-B store to serving as the director of marketing and vice president of grocery manufacturing for the entire company.
When the decision was made in the fall of 1998 to begin the push into Dallas, the job fell to Stephen. He moved his family to Dallas. “I started with one real estate person,” he says. “We bought maps, got in our cars, and started driving. We studied the wet/dry lines to see where we could sell wine and beer.”
For six months, Stephen studied Dallas. Then, in the spring of 1999, he gathered together 14 company executives and took them on a 10-day trip to Europe, Canada, the United States, and Mexico—a junket dedicated to deciding the best concept to use to enter the Dallas market. “Dallas was already well served by grocery stores,” Stephen says. “We wanted to bring something new. We also wanted to make sure we weren’t missing something.”
The options at the time were to open a series of smaller H-E-B stores, the same format the company used to enter the Houston market, or to go ahead with big-box H-E-B stores that include drugstores. They could also open at least one Central Market or come up with an entirely new concept. “We knew that a Central Market created a kind of ’halo effect’ for our other stores,” Stephen tells me. “We learned it in Austin. It creates internal competition for quality.” But the company had never opened a Central Market in a city where it didn’t already have a significant presence. It had never led with its halo. Until Dallas.
“We were in Milan, at the IPER market,” Stephen remembers. “They have the most powerful produce selection and fresh breads: it creates a theater of perishables. We looked around and said that this is what we want to create.” The group decided that it already had, in Central Market, the right format to move into Dallas and could incorporate elements of the Italian bakery. “We want to be indispensable,” Stephen says. “Central Market fills basic needs in a more complete way. People celebrate and mourn over food.”
“The change in the food world was happening even before Sept. 11,” Michael Cox tells me as he unfolds his napkin. Cox is the new general manager of the Plano Central Market. We’ve just stepped out of the Fort Worth store where Cox has broken from a meeting with his department heads. They’re about to begin the hiring process for the Plano store. To get the 400 employees that they will need, Cox and his team will interview more than 1,500 applicants.
Cox is Midwestern in every sense: earnest, easy, and direct. When he mentions his family—his parents or his children—he smiles. He is one of those “non-grocery store” people that Central Market cultivates. His background is in restaurants, but before that, automotive plants. “I started out working at a pickup truck factory,” he says, smiling. “I put hoods on Ford F-150 Super Cabs, but food was already in my blood. Even when I was young I was buying dishes and plates. My mom would say, ’Why are you buying that?’ and I’d tell her that I didn’t know.”
Cox got his start in the food business waiting tables at Stephan Pyles’ Routh Street Cafe. Ten years later, he and Pyles opened Star Canyon. They followed with AquaKnox before selling the group to Carlson Restaurants. Like Pyles, Cox hung around Carlson for a year or so before getting itchy. He left in May 2000.
“Dining as entertainment has played itself out,” he tells me. “It could only go so far—combining different cultures and foods in our market. And yet people want a connection with food, earth, and family. If Central Market had been just an average grocery store, I wouldn’t have been interested.” When I mention to Cox that the unlikely duo of Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl and Alice Waters of Chez Panisse recently gave a lecture in which they chastised Americans for eating important meals outside the home, Cox nods. “I feel fortunate,” he says, “to be a part of this movement, the movement back toward eating at home.”
Central Market is at the leading edge of that movement—good food eaten at home. They’ve upped the ante for Tom Thumb and Whole Foods and are challenging the very idea of conventional grocery stores. Perhaps it was time for a revolution.
Jeff Bowden is a D Magazine contributing editor.
