A college assignment helped steer Bob Kleszics into a career in the grocery business. Founder and CEO of Harvest Market in Hockessin, Delaware, Kleszics was an anthropology major at the University of Delaware in 1979 when he took a field methods class. For the course, the student goes outside the classroom and into a group’s natural environment – observing, conducting interviews and participating in the group’s social life.
“The group I picked was the hippies at the local food co-op,” said Kleszics, adding that his professor approved.
Kleszics started interviewing people at the co-op, became a member and wrapped up his field study in about a month. Kleszics grew up Dover, known as “lower, slower Delaware,” so he had yet to be exposed to hippies and the counterculture before then.
“I learned that it was just a different world,” he said.
But he was not a stranger to health food, nor to the food store business. His first job was stocking produce at Colonial Village Meat Market, and his dad worked for Grand Union in northern New Jersey in the 1960s.
His Aunt Grace was subscribing to Prevention magazine back in the ‘60s and serving chopped salads and other foods he didn’t get at home. That piqued his interest in natural and organic foods, he said.
When he was a teen and making more of his own food choices, “I would shop at GNC and buy vitamins and make shakes that had raw eggs with milk and yogurt and brewer’s yeast and lecithin,” he said.
In May 1979, after his field study at the co-op, there was a job opening at the store. He was hired to be a general staff member. At that point, Newark Co-op was in a small house on a side street in the college town. It was not fancy; Indian-print bedspreads were tacked to the ceiling to cover the cracks.
So instead of graduating from the university and going to work for a company in Virginia doing site surveys, as was his initial plan, Kleszics stayed with the co-op and moved up to buyer and produce manager, assistant manager and then general manager. He was with the co-op for 16 years, the last nine as GM, “and that’s where I learned how to be a natural foods grocer.”
During his tenure there, he oversaw the store’s move to a shopping center on the main thoroughfare in town, “and we really had to up our game. I had to learn how to be more of a businessperson when we did that.”
He left the co-op when he could no longer stomach the arguments during membership meetings over whether it should sell meat. Co-ops are governed by a board of directors, but co-op members have a lot of input on decisions, he explained. While Kleszics was a vegan at the time, he still believed customers had the right to make the choice.
“I believed that anybody that wanted to eat meat should be able to get the best quality meat they could find. Which is what we sold,” he said.
Road to success wasn’t smooth
Not long after resigning from the co-op, he and a partner decided in 1995 to open a natural food store. Harvest Market was located in Hockessin, which is about a mile south of the Pennsylvania border.
They picked the town because its residents tend to have high income and education levels – the “sweet spot” for organic and natural foods retailers, he said – and there was a lack of direct competition in the area.
But there was a problem. The night before the 3,000-square-foot store was to debut, the landlord informed them they couldn’t open because the supermarket that already operated in the shopping center held exclusive rights to sell produce there.
They eventually reached a settlement with the landlord and got $40,000, which they used to procure the only space they could find in town. It was 1,000 square feet.
The store stayed in that first location for just four months before moving to another small space.
Around 2000, it expanded into adjoining space, doubling in size to 2,000 square feet, “and we kept growing sales,” he said.
In 2005, he found out a local restaurant was for sale. It was 6,000 square feet and had 24 years left on its lease, which clinched the deal for Kleszics.
[RELATED: Opportunity For Independent Grocers Abounds In Urban, Diverse Northeast]
Onward and upward
Today, the store, in its third location at 7417 Lancaster Pike in Hockessin, is thriving. It will celebrate 30 years in business this July and now serves an average of 530 shoppers a day.
Last year, Harvest Market had 7 percent growth; over the last four months alone, it has been 13 percent, according to Kleszics. There’s usually an uptick in business every January along with healthier-eating resolutions, but “that surge started back in October and November. We’re a very busy little store. We’re turning the inventory over very quickly.”
The store has a 12-foot Grab and Go case that brings in 18 percent of total store sales. The case is stocked by staff members of the Harvest Market Kitchen. Customer favorites include a curry chicken salad and chicken and wild rice soup.
“We have soups, salads, sides, proteins for both meat eaters and vegetarians, and then we have some desserts and baked goods, sweet and non-sweet,” Kleszics said.
The Kitchen has seven workstations that are staffed for two shifts a day, but “we cannot keep the case 100 percent filled all the time,” he said.
The busiest time is typically before and during lunchtime, according to Kleszics, who noted it draws two types of customers.
“We have … the type that buys our grab and go because they don’t have time to cook but want fresh food, and then the people who do take the time to cook, so they’re buying their fresh proteins and their fresh vegetables and combining them and making their own meals.”
The store, like many independent natural food stores, has strict guidelines on what products it will sell.
“Our focus is on organic, on local and on foods that don’t have artificial colors, flavors, preservatives or hundreds of chemicals. That’s the niche that we carved out,” he said.
Produce makes up another 15 to 16 percent of sales.
“Our produce is exclusively either organic or local,” Kleszics said. “Depending on the season, we have 90 to 97 percent organic produce, and then the rest would be local. And if it’s local, it’s from farms that we know, where we have a direct relationship.”
The store’s biggest growth department over the past year has been refrigerated perishables, including milk, eggs, packaged cheese, alternative milks and vegetarian foods.
“That growth has been consistently 20 percent-plus for almost a year,” he said, adding that those numbers don’t include the store’s specialty cheese section, which has its own full-time cheesemonger.
“She really upped our game in cheeses,” Kleszics said. “There had been a local cheese specialty store a few miles away that closed, and we thought that that would be a good vacuum to fill.”
Evolving operations
With the continued growth of the business, Kleszics said it would be great if it could expand into adjacent spaces, but that opportunity has not yet presented itself.
In the meantime, Kleszics and his wife Karen Ashley – who serves as vice president, comptroller and special projects manager – continue to fine-tune operations.
When they needed extra space during the COVID-19 pandemic, they found an 1,800-square-foot space – called the annex – half a mile away. It serves as a warehouse for backstock, a packaging room for bulk items and cheeses they slice and wrap, a staff kitchenette and breakroom, and offices for marketing, bookkeeping and buyers.
Last year, they replaced “wonky” freezers with new ones and installed the Catapult POS system from ECRS. He said many of Harvest Market’s fellow members of the Independent Natural Food Retailers Association also use Catapult, which helped with the decision.
The store’s buying team has benefited from improved reporting, he said, and they’ve been able to institute perpetual inventory thanks to Catapult.
Kleszics emphasized that Harvest Market’s ability to compete on price with the bigger chains is “because we are members of INFRA. The monthly specials, the deals that they work out with our primary supplier partner – which is KeHE – have been invaluable. We could not possibly compete on price without that relationship.”
INFRA was established as a purchasing cooperative in 2005 with four members. It now has 330 members operating 560 storefronts across the country.
Kleszics also credited Ashley with instituting operational improvements.
“When she came on board about 12 years ago, she was much more systems oriented than I was. I was more seat-of-the-pants in my operational approach, and she was more backroom systems, SOPs for everything type of an approach and better planning. She’s instilled that kind of ethos into our managers, so I don’t really have to do a whole lot anymore,” he joked.
Star staff
Actually, Kleszics is still a very visible presence at the store, helping unload trucks and stocking the shelves. Shoppers know him, and “the No. 1 thing that customers go out of their way to tell me is that you have the nicest staff, and that really, I think, is the biggest part of our success. We hire well, we train well and we hire people that are generally happy and enjoy working in the store and interacting with our customers.
“We have such a small store that you can’t escape our staff,” he said. “We don’t skimp on staff because our product turnover is so high. We’re constantly restocking and they’re constantly facing and making sure that the store looks as good as possible and that the customers can find what they’re looking for.”
Harvest Market has about 70 team members, with about a third staffing the kitchen.
“We invest in our staff,” he added. “We attend INFRA workshops and trainings. We’ve sent people to Zingerman’s trainings and, for the most part, we promote from within. All of our managers have come from within.”
A couple of staff members have been at the store for more than 20 years, several for more than a decade.
Listening to what customers want is another strength of Harvest Market. Customer are welcome to request a product, and “if we can squeeze it into our 4,200 square feet of retail, we will [source it] if we feel like it’s got an opportunity to be a seller.”
Both full-time and part-time staff get discounts on store purchases.
“Mini-meetings” with staff about three times a week help everyone know what products are new, so they can alert shoppers.
[RELATED: ‘Modest’ Describes Current, Future Growth In Delaware]