The owners of natural foods retailer MaMa Jean’s Natural Market aren’t shying away from an increasingly competitive Springfield grocery market.
They are staking their claim on a third store, the latest a familiar East Sunshine retail spot.
MaMa Jean’s co-owner Diana Hicks said the health food store is planning to open March 1 at 3530 E. Sunshine St., the former site of the Furniture Broker.
Hicks and fellow co-owner Susie Farbin purchased the building Nov. 2 from IDK LLC, which is operated by Furniture Broker manager Kerry Wilson. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and Wilson could not be reached for comment by deadline.
Despite more than a handful of new grocery options opening doors in Springfield in the last 15 months, Hicks said the market could support another natural foods store.
“Business has been good. I think more people are paying attention to what they are putting in their bodies. The baby boomers are getting up there in years and want to do everything they can to be healthy. And it is not just baby boomers who want to be healthy,” Hicks said, noting the company got a good deal on the 1-acre property, which was appraised for $1.1 million in 2012, according to Greene County assessor records.
Hicks said she expects MaMa Jean’s sales to dip 20 percent at the first two locations during the third store’s first year of operations. After opening MaMa Jean’s second location, in the Green Circle Shopping Center, the owners experienced a similar dip at their original 1727 S. Campbell Ave. store but have since rebounded, she said, declining to disclose company revenues. In 2009, the year after adding the south-side store, MaMa Jean’s recorded $7.75 million on three-year growth of 109 percent to rank No. 3 in Springfield Business Journal’s Dynamic Dozen fast-growth awards.
With the blossoming of grocery options in Springfield, Hicks said MaMa Jean’s is built on a niche different enough to stand out from the likes of Walmart Neighborhood Markets, Hy-Vee and Save-A-Lot – brands that entered the Springfield market since September 2011. Springfield’s grocery market has become more competitive with the closure of two stores – Price Cutter on East Sunshine and Smillies Market on South Glenstone – and the addition of six new options. Save-A-Lot and Hy-Vee each opened a grocery store, and Wal-Mart has added four of its grocery-centered Neighborhood Markets. Hy-Vee and Wal-Mart each plan to bring at least one more store to town.
“Even though we may offer some of the same things, we’re just different,” Hicks said.
Considering the affluent neighborhoods on the east side of town, Hicks hopes residents would be interested in such organic and natural products as MaMa Jean’s Quorn Soy-free Turk’y Roast, BioKleen Automatic Dish Powder or Spectrum Canola Mayonnaise.
“I’m hoping there are some customers out there that we don’t know yet,” Hicks said, noting the third store is not a move to corner the natural foods market with the intent of discouraging larger competitors such as Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods from entering Springfield.
MaMa Jean’s currently leases space in two retail centers: 11,000 square feet in Wedgewood Center on Campbell near Sunshine Street, where it opened in December 2002, and 13,500 square feet in Green Circle, the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design-Platinum certified center on Republic Road near National Avenue.
“We don’t have a lot of room in the back to receive a lot of merchandise, and there are opportunities to get better deals,” Hicks said, noting the property acquisition provides storage room and office space. “If we got a pallet of something at one of our stores, we’d have to get rid of it pretty quickly or we’d be walking over it all the time.”
She said 9,000 square feet of the 24,000-square-foot building on Sunshine would be devoted to warehouse and offices. MaMa Jean’s has hired Missouri Supermarket Builders as general contractor for the remodeling project, with design work by Butler, Rosenbury & Partners Inc. Hicks declined to disclose renovation costs.
Hicks said MaMa Jean’s would hire more than 20 employees for the new store and would bring in employees from other stores for a staff of about 50. The company currently employs about 90 workers, she said.
Aaron Evans, a territorial sales manager for Romeoville, Ill-based natural and organic food supplier Tree of Life, said a third location should help boost sales in Springfield for his company that sells 30,000 products such as organic breads, pet supplies, and health and beauty aids. Evans is intimately familiar with MaMa Jean’s operations, having worked there as a stocker beginning in 2007 before taking a sales position with Tree of Life in 2010.
“Watching them during the last couple of years – and working for them, too – their growth is almost unprecedented in Missouri,” said Evans, describing MaMa Jean’s as one of the distributor’s top customers in the state, though he declined to disclose sales volumes. “MaMa Jean’s is a great success story.”
MaMa Jean’s derives part of its name from Farbin’s mother, Jean Farbin, who in the late 1970s opened Jean’s Healthway natural foods store in Ava. Susie Farbin and Hicks – a 30-year employee of O’Reilly Automotive – became friends in 1996, and soon began developing plans for a store in Springfield, according to
MaMaJeansMarket.com. For good measure, Hicks always called her mother Loweta Hicks, MaMa, and that served as the inspiration for the first part of the company’s name, according to the website.
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