Super Markets

SUPER MARKETS No junk food here

Scott Roseman and his New Leaf Community Markets

By Elizabeth Limbach Photography by Ted Holladay

Long before Scott Roseman founded Santa Cruz-based New Leaf Community Markets, he was a young boy growing up on Long Island, eating “hamburgers, hot dogs, lamb chops and anything that was meat.” Fish meant canned tuna, and vegetables were rarities often found between a bun and a hamburger patty. “I was as bad an eater as could be,” he says.

The chain of events that led Roseman to found New Leaf’s progenitor, the Westside Community Market, began at age 21, when he moved to California to study sociology at UC Santa Cruz.

Influenced by his new surroundings, and by Frances Moore Lappé’s healthy eating manifesto, Diet for a Small Planet, Roseman’s eating habits shifted to the fresh and healthy diet he continues today. “It’s almost the opposite of what I ate growing up—lots of fruits and vegetables, and just good food,” he says. He joined the Westside’s Neighborhood Food Co-op, and the transformation went on from there.

By this time, Roseman had realized that his goal in life was to “make the world a better place,” but he did not yet know that accomplishing it would involve that small, bohemian natural foods coop. Even after working at the store for three years and taking on a large buying role, Roseman hoped to pursue public service and perhaps go into politics. As much as he had grown to love working in the natural foods business, he grew weary of the in-fighting and dis-

organization that plagued the co-op. He was already thinking of leaving when, at 28 years old, he was diagnosed with leukemia in 1984.

“It’s hard to know why I got sick,” he says. “I was already eating well.” His big plans for changing the world were put on hold as he underwent grueling chemotherapy and radiation treatments that lasted the better part of a year.

“I wasn’t very optimistic that I was going to get to the end of that,” Roseman says. “But at a certain point I changed my attitude; I said, ‘I’m going to beat this thing.’ And I did.”

The experience was life changing, to say the least. He bought the floundering co-op in 1985, scrubbed it down, spruced it up and reopened it as the Westside Community Market that October. “It was like me coming back from the dead, almost literally, and being able to do this thing,” he says. “I wasn’t looking to make a lot of money. I just wanted to do something in my life that was meaningful. And in this case I could have a place where I could sell good food to people.”

Store for the Times

As we announced in this issue of Edible Monterey Bay (see “Local Heroes,” p. 6), our readers chose New Leaf Markets as their 2013 Best Food Retailer in the online vote we held late last year, clearly demonstrating the local chain’s popularity.

But the story of New Leaf Community Markets is a good illustration of the soaring growth and increasing sophistication of the good food movement as a whole: What began as a modest health food store perpetually evolved over the last 27 years, growing to its current seven stores and 500 employees. What’s more, in May, New Leaf will open its first East Bay store, in Pleasanton, and Roseman is also eyeing Monterey County.

“For years, we have tried to find an appropriate location to open a store in Monterey,” Roseman says. “We will continue to aggressively pursue this goal, as we know that Monterey would be a great community to operate in.”

From the start, New Leaf placed an emphasis on local, organic and sustainable foods, and that has made it a natural leader as consumer demand for these foods has grown.

When Roseman re-opened the store as New Leaf in 1990, U.S. sales of organic food and beverages totaled $1 billion, according to the Organic Trade Association (OTA). By the company’s 25th anniversary in 2010, that figure had skyrocketed to $26.7 billion.

“We’ve always gone after the local producers,” says Roseman. “When the local craze happened, we didn’t have to change anything.”

Today, fruits and vegetables from nearby farms like Swanton Berry Farm, Lakeside Organic Gardens, Route 1 Farms and Happy Boy Farms fill New Leaf’s produce departments, and local varieties of everything from jam to hummus to tofu line the shelves.

As for organics, Roseman says New Leaf’s inventory has expanded along with the industry.

“Back in [the early] days we sold a lot of organic produce, but we sold a lot of conventional produce, too,” Roseman says. “There weren’t any organic packaged meals or organic things in cans, bottles, boxes—that all evolved over the last 25 years.” He adds that more than 95% of New Leaf’s produce is now organic.

By contrast, OTA’s 2011 Organic Industry Survey shows that just 11% of all U.S. fruit and vegetable sales were for organic produce, and overall, organic foods account for just 4% of food and beverages sold in the country.

Organic growth: this page, Coastal Kale Salad; opposite, Scott Roseman.

At the heart of New Leaf’s mission to “nurture and sustain our community” are strict standards for what the stores will offer. The guidelines are forever in flux, as the “very picky” staff tirelessly works to address food issues as they arise and shift its standards to keep up with the latest information.

“It’s an ongoing discussion at New Leaf,” says Roseman. “We spend an ungodly number of hours discussing what our product standards were, are and will be.”

For example, shoppers can rest easy knowing that meats for sale at New Leaf are always antibiotic and hormone free, which isn’t something many stores can say, even among those who claim to have natural meats.

“When we started selling fresh meat back in 1990, we developed a standard that it would be no antibiotics or hormones, ever,” Roseman says. “The ‘ever’ is the key piece of the puzzle. I’ll go to other natural food stores all over the country—some really, really good ones—and they’ll be selling meat that doesn’t meet the standards we’ve set.” He points to one natural food store chain, in particular, that is a lot like New Leaf and that he respects. “Their beef claims to be no antibiotics or hormones, but the animals will be treated with antibiotics if they get sick,” he says. “You can make that claim if the animal hasn’t been treated with those in the last three months of its life.” (That’s where New Leaf’s “ever” clause comes in.)

A decade ago, New Leaf partnered with UC Santa Cruz researchers and Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program to create FishWise, the effort that has pioneered sustainable seafood buying and labeling by retailers. (Green, yellow and red labels indicate best choice, good alternative and items to be avoided, respectively.) Roseman says New Leaf has seen tangible results from the labeling program.

“After about a year [of labeling], anything that was red stopped selling and we basically got rid of it,” Roseman says. “Our customers eliminated the red. We didn’t dictate to them ‘no you can’t buy this food’; we left it to them and they chose over time to stop buying those kinds of seafood.”

Fighting for Health

New Leaf doesn’t just peddle organics and other good food to shoppers—it also strives to educate the community about healthy eating and cooking.

To that end, Roseman constructed a spacious classroom in the Westside store, and offers programs ranging from kids’ cooking camps to courses on basic nutrition during pregnancy, preparing raw foods and gluten-free cooking.

“Most people were raised on packaged food and really don’t have the knowledge of the seasons, nor do they know where our food comes from, other than from a box,” says Sparrow Johnson, the Westside New Leaf’s manager and one of the company’s first employees. “We want people to get back to that essential stuff.”

Local nutritionist Jennifer Brewer teaches many of New Leaf’s classes, and says the store is an ideal partner for her work. “Instead of spending a lot of time telling someone to steer clear of trans-fatty acids, or to be concerned about food chemicals, I can have faith that

when they shop at New Leaf, they won’t get those—ever,” Brewer says. “It is as if many of New Leaf’s products are a nutrition education in and of themselves.”

But for customers who lack the time to purchase nutritious, whole foods and turn them into tasty dinners every night, all of New Leaf’s outlets provide an extensive array of freshly made organic prepared foods for takeout. (The Coastal Kale Salad is a customer favorite.)

Giving Back

Since the beginning, Roseman has made sure that New Leaf gives 10% of annual profits to the community—whether it’s by writing checks and donating food or hosting “Community Days,” when 5% of sales go to a particular organization.

The company was a pioneer of the Envirotoken program, through which it donates a dime to customer-selected local environmental nonprofits for each bag customers save.

And Johnson notes that Roseman’s commitment to giving back to the community starts with his employees, who are offered profit-sharing and health benefits—things that are not so common in retail.

If there’s any criticism of New Leaf, it centers—as is with typical with specialty and organic food stores—on prices. But the store has to balance its mission of being accessible with its mission to provide what it truly believes is high-quality, healthful food, and that has inherent costs.

“We try our best to make the food as affordable as possible, and I think we’ve done a good job of bringing a good value to the food,” Roseman says. “But it isn’t cheap. If you want to buy organic, even though the price difference between conventional and organic has narrowed, it’s still more.”

To help keep its products within reach of low-income shoppers, the stores accept WIC and EBT and offer a 10% daily discount to seniors enrolled in New Leaf’s senior discount card program.

And just teaching the value of healthy food and how to cook it, as New Leaf does, provides a skill necessary for eating well, especially on a budget.

“If people know how to cook from scratch, and take the time to cook, they’ll realize that cooking is time well spent,” says Johnson, noting that buying grains and beans in bulk, and organic produce that is in season—both things that New Leaf provides—can help eliminate the organic premium.

It also speaks volumes that local farmers, like long-time New Leaf supplier Jeff Larkey, owner of the organic Route 1 Farms, think so highly of New Leaf’s service to the local food community.

“Their support for local is phenomenal,” he says, adding that he considers the fact that New Leaf opened up shop in a former Safeway in Half Moon Bay particularly meaningful.

“It’s very symbolic in terms of the change in public consciousness about eating healthy and local,” he says. “People are starting to be more conscious in terms of how far their food has traveled from its source. New Leaf is paying attention to that more than anyone else.”

Elizabeth Limbach is an award-winning journalist based in Santa Cruz.