“This is the best store we’ve ever put together,” says Harvest Market store director Rick Marshall, pictured here with operations manager (and self-professed jack-of-all-trades) Donna Wright. | J. Adrian Wylie
Harvest Market on Briarwood Circle, anticipating a mid-April opening, will be Ann Arbor’s first new supermarket in over a decade.
But it’s much more than that. For starters, it launches the broader redevelopment of the adjacent fifty-two-year-old mall. Soon to follow are the Harlan—a 370-unit luxury apartment complex—and a Dick’s Sporting Goods, all on and around the site of the demolished Sears.
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It’s also an all-day restaurant, a bar, and a two-level, indoor/outdoor third space for work, meetups, music, and events. There’s a coffee shop with an outside walk-up window, a salad bar, and a sweets shop for ice cream, popcorn, and cotton candy.
The spacious mezzanine with tables and counter seating overlooking the airy main level leads to a large balcony and includes plush furnishings set by a large fireplace. Beers on tap are all local, filled from the bottom up in magnetized glasses. A separate room, the Nook, is for cooking and other classes and demonstrations.
It’s the fourth iteration of Quincy, Illinois–based Niemann Foods’ experiential concept with a mission to connect consumers to the people who make their food, particularly local farmers and artisanal producers.
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“It’s important that our customers see what we’re doing, that we’re not just opening a bag and pouring it into a tub,” says Donna Wright, Harvest Market’s first employee dating back to 2016, their human resource manager, and self-professed jack-of-all-trades. “So that transparency goes that step farther, because we want people to be able to hold us accountable for the products that we’re serving.”
Rick Marshall served as store director for the first Harvest Market in Champaign, Illinois, then oversaw the brand as it expanded into Springfield, Illinois, and Carmel, Indiana. He recently moved here to focus on directing the 109-year-old Niemann Foods’ first entry into Michigan.
“This is the best store we’ve ever put together,” he says. “The CEO has allowed me and the store team to make decisions.” The result is better flow between the two ground-floor sections and within the “front end” that includes six staffed lanes and eight self-service checkouts.
In addition to the dozens of bulk food bins, the high-ceilinged produce floor, and the bakery, butcher shop, and cheese shop, there are eleven grocery aisles: a mix of conventional, specialty, and natural. They call the endcaps “farm finds,” highlighting the names, locations, and stories of food producers. Those wares are also ingredients in the Farmhouse
Restaurant, where customers get a number at the ordering counter to have the food brought to them. Weekend breakfast buffets are in the offing.
Interviewed the day of an open house for locals hoping to place their products there (a salsa maker he’d met at Eastern Market dips in to say hi), Marshall opens his phone to share a snapshot of a two-hour-old dairy calf. He’d recently traveled three hours up north to Mio to tour Farmers’ Creamery and one of the grass-fed herds among the small cooperative’s Amish farms. Their ice cream will be scooped in the sweets shop, cheese curds fried in the restaurant, and sweet cream used in the butter churned on-site.
Marshall explains that the Harvest Market concept stemmed from CEO Rich Niemann, also a cattle rancher in Missouri, wanting to build more understanding of where shoppers’ food comes from. Cuts of Niemann Ranch beef appear in their butcher shops several times a year (and more often in ground form).
They’ve also cultivated direct relationships with Vestergaard Farms and Bev’s Bagels, among other area producers. “In the meat shop, the produce shop, the center store, the grocery department, we have people that are also working some of those local outlets trying to get those people into the store,” he says. “There’s not a ton of red tape.”
Shelf-stable groceries are already stocked, even as they continue hiring a crew of about 250. Marshall says about a hundred will be full-time, where benefits include a stock ownership plan. With so many different departments, there are plenty of “full-time opportunities for people to grow into over time. In a new store, that can happen kinda quick.”
Store associates contributed such ideas as fresh dog treats made in the bakery to the “cowboy burger” with barbecue pork, onion rings, and cheddar.
“I learned through the interview process so far that there’s a lot of creative people,” he says. “That really stood out to me, how connected they were to local … and just food in general, and diets. Very educated too. People were excited about this kind of opportunity to work in a bigger store that allows their associates to make a lot of decisions and create things. I mean, that’s a big deal here.”
Harvest Market, 910 Briarwood Cir. Daily 7 a.m.–9 p.m. goharvestmarket.com
So basically this is Whole Foods from before COVID. Which, no doubt, I liked way better than the Amazonified Whole Foods. Will definitely check this out when they open!