Destination Grocery Store To Open At New Address In Marathon, TX

Some grocers are born into the business and some choose it. Some just seem to have it in their blood and are able to create not just stores, but destinations. Sam Stavinoha has created such a place in the tiny West Texas town of Marathon, a stop on the way south to Big Bend National Park. Its population as of the 2020 census was 410, including Stavinoha, who purchased The French Co. Grocer in 2019.

The store was deemed “the coolest place to be in West Texas” by a writer for Food & Wine magazine, Daniel Modlin, in April 2023. Modlin said that calling The French Co. Grocer a “grocery store” doesn’t quite do it justice; it’s a good bit more than that. It sells not only upscale takeout food like tacos and tamales, fresh produce and espresso from Stavinoha’s own machine but also camping gear like headlamps, canteens and tents for those on their way to Big Bend National Park, some 75 miles away. It also sells local wines and beers, as well as grocery essentials.

What it doesn’t sell is French food. The store’s name comes from founder William French, who opened it in 1900 as Marathon’s first general store. It was called The French Co., and his daughter Lucille ran the store until 1972.

The store changed hands a few times after that, Stavinoha said. When it was purchased in 2006, the French name returned, this time with the “Grocer” added, to signify that the general store was more a grocery store for those not familiar with it.

The fight to stay

When Stavinoha purchased the store and moved to Marathon in 2019 – he’s a native of Andrews, Texas, north of Midland – he signed a five-year lease for the land the store sat on just off the highway.

He began to make changes and improvements to the store’s offerings and to the grounds, adding outdoor space for hosting community events as well as Friday “Burger Nights,” with live entertainment. The store’s kitchen staff grill hamburgers made with local grass-fed beef, side them with homemade potato chips and sell them until they run out.

“We really tried to reinvigorate not just what was happening in the store, but also in Marathon, so we got really engaged with different groups in town. We hosted tons of fundraisers and chamber of commerce meetings,” he said. “I was trying to be as engaged as I could, because I didn’t really know anyone in town when I moved there. It was a good tool to facilitate our engagement.”

In addition to Food & Wine, stories on The French Co. Grocer also appeared in Texas Monthly, Texas Highways and Big Bend Times, and customers posted glowing comments.

Last February, Stavinoha learned that his option to purchase the real estate within the lease terms would not be honored. And he had no recourse, given that Texas real estate laws “give landowners a lot of rights,” he said.

He looked at the two or three other properties in Marathon that might work for the store but came up empty. He decided he had no alternative but to go out of business.

“I got quite resigned through the whole thing,” Stavinoha said. “I went, ‘OK, well, this was fun and I learned a lot, but we’re going to close the store. That was going to be that; I was going to move on with my life and find something else to do.”

But there was that friend that wouldn’t let him give up so easily. In fact, she “kind of lashed out at me,” he said. “She said, ‘I’m not going to let you do that. I’m not going to let you give up. You love this so much. And if you do that, then the person that created this problem is going to win, and they’re just going to step in where you left off and benefit from all the goodwill that you’ve created over the last five years.’”

That’s when she floated the crazy idea of asking the couple that owned the café a couple of blocks away if they were interested in selling to him. They had only owned the café a couple of years and it was successful, so Stavinoha felt the chances they wanted to sell were slim to none.

But he was wrong. Turns out, the husband wanted to do a business venture with some friends in his native California, and his wife wanted to do something else, too.

So they struck a fair deal, but Stavinoha was strapped for cash. He had been working to pay off his debt on the store and had just done so, but that had left him with little in the bank.

“I got this property under contract, but I didn’t tell him that I didn’t have any money,” Stavinoha said. “That’s when we launched the GoFundMe.”

The goal of “Save The French Grocer” is $142,042; 602 donations have brought in more than two-thirds of that.

“Asking for help is humbling, and difficult, but without the aid of our broader community, we will not be able to continue operating…,” Stavinoha said on the GoFundMe page. “Relocation … comes at a substantial cost and is by far the most expensive and challenging effort this store will ever face. Pandemic included.”

Stavinoha had just a 120-day window to raise the down payment, so in addition to the GoFundMe, an auction was held. Multi-day river trips, custom-built furniture and other “really cool stuff” that was donated to the cause brought in another $20,000, he said.

But he still couldn’t quite believe it was all going to work out.

“I thought, well, if we don’t raise the money before the option period ends, then I’ll resign myself again, and I’ll quit, and I’ll move on with my life,” he said.

But it did work out. He was able to get a sufficient down payment together and secure a construction loan and mortgage in May of last year.

An architect friend helped him with drawings to reimagine the café space as a grocery store. It has not been a linear path to a design for the approximately 4,000-square-foot store, which is about 40 percent larger than the current store that is still operating thanks to Stavinoha’s 15 or so team members.

“In June, we started to work on the new property, and we kind of came up with a tentative plan, [but] the plan is still changing,” he said, adding that there have probably been 18 different plans thus far.

The initial thought was to just make the café building bigger to create the wide-open spaces needed for a food store, but “because of the peculiarities of how the building was built and torn apart and rebuilt for different reasons over the last 60 years, it wouldn’t work.”

Today, the façade and the slab are all that remain of the former café, but progress has been made.

Built to last

So many things have fallen into place for Stavinoha and The French Co. Grocer since his original plan was thwarted.

In the early days of owning The French Grocer, he had met Bob Estrin, president of the nonprofit School of Constructive Arts in Alpine. The school teaches regenerative building methods.

Around the time Stavinoha was deep in the process of getting the loans and plans for the new store set, two tornadoes hit the neighboring community of Sanderson. They were devastating, wiping out buildings that had stood for more than a century.

Still standing were structures made with adobe blocks. Though made by hand and not always very precisely, they are heavy and their lime content actually causes them to get stronger over time, not weaker.

“I was already starting to think more about the way Bob was talking about building and that philosophy, and then the tornadoes happen,” Stavinoha said.

That cemented his decision to engage Estrin and the School of Constructive Arts to help make compressed earth block, which is essentially machine-made adobe, to construct the store.

They rented a machine from a San Antonio company, Advanced Earthen Construction Technologies, and used land from a friend of Stavinoha’s to set up the operation to create 14,000 blocks. It took about five weeks.

Last Nov. 16-17, an “Earth Block Party” was held. Twenty-five School of Constructive Arts students and French Grocer volunteers came together at the site at 113 NE 1st St. in Marathon to lay the first course of earth blocks for the new store.

On the day Stavinoha spoke to The Shelby Report, he had spent five hours transporting blocks to the store.

“Every day we’re just stacking block, building window frames, building door frames, building lintels. We’ve come a long way,” he said.

Stavinoha and his friends were “super meticulous” when they tore the café down to the slab and façade.

“We saved every single piece of tin and roofing and every board, and we stacked it neatly, and we pulled every nail and screw out of it,” he explained. “We’ve been able to reuse a lot of that. And by the time we’re done with the buildout, I think we’re going to end up using quite a lot of it.”

The store is more than halfway complete, with anticipated opening in May.

Maximizing opportunity

A self-proclaimed “grocery nerd,” Stavinoha said he has taken photos of shelving in many stores he’s visited since becoming a store owner.

“I’ve just been thinking about shelving for a long time, and I’ve been building these shelves that are going to help maximize that square footage,” he said. “We have a 40 percent increase in square footage, but then we also are going to have more efficient shelving, so we will be able to carry more per square foot.”

The new location also allows for a much larger courtyard venue for events. Shade sails like at the original French Co. Grocer outdoor space will probably be up initially, but more permanent shade structures are planned.

The Marathon store also will have a counter café inside, with seating for maybe 12 people.

“There’s a big need for that, especially since I so rudely displaced one of the only cafes in town,” Stavinoha said.

But it will definitely be counter service, not a full-fledged restaurant, he added. “I want to try to keep it really simple and stay true to our main mission, which is running a grocery store.”

Running a grocery store is important in Marathon. The French Co. Grocer is the only store within a 30-mile radius that accepts SNAP benefits, which added another layer of pressure for Stavinoha to keep it open.

Doing this for his community has come at a personal price. Stavinoha said he has worked seven days a week for the past year as this saga has unfolded.

“I don’t recommend that to any aspiring entrepreneur, even though in my case, there was no other way,” Stavinoha said. “It will harm you; it will harm your health and your relationships in ways that are really hard to recover from.”

But, as he wrote on the GoFundMe page: “Failure is not an option. It never has been, not in this chapter, nor during the original French family’s chapters over 100 years ago. Leaving Marathon with a void, a wound, is not an option. We strongly hope for your support, and with it, expect to be successful in our plans for the future.”

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