ADRIAN — The story of Adrian’s newest grocery store begins with an ingredient list.

Jay and Gwynne Marks were making dinner with their kids one night in 2016 when the idea that would one day turn into the Marks Trading Company struck. “Our oldest daughter was looking at the back of a seasoning packet for taco meat and couldn’t pronounce the words,” Jay said.

That moment led first to a small cottage business mixing and packaging sustainably grown spices to sell at farmers markets, then to selling products in a few grocery stores, and then to the couple starting a full-service grocery store of their own at 220 N. Main St. in downtown Adrian.

But let’s go back to the beginning.

That packet of taco seasoning and its list of multisyllabic additives and preservatives sparked an idea. At the time, Gwynne worked for the Farm Service Agency and Jay was a senior technical adviser for Apple — though he previously had spent about 20 years in the restaurant business. But in their spare time, they started researching sustainably grown herbs and spices and mixing their own blends to sell.

“The first thing that we did was attend the Sand Creek craft show, and we started out with 20 spice blends,” Jay said.

“It’s kind of cliched,” he added, “but at lunchtime we started the concept on the back of a beverage napkin.”

It was a venture that, truthfully, neither of them really believed would go far.

“Secretly, neither of us thought it was going to last more than six months, but we didn’t tell the other person,” Jay said.

But they kept going, and one at a time, things started to happen. They won a $1,000 grant through the Square One pitch contest sponsored by Lenawee Now, and they were part of the Launch Lenawee business incubator’s first graduating class. The Launch Lenawee experience, Jay said, provided networking opportunities and “the 50,000-foot view of the business.”

Then one day in 2019, they were at a farmers market and learned that the southeast Michigan grocery store chain Busch’s was looking for products like theirs.

“By October we were in our first two stores,” Jay said.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced them to adapt, pivoting to online orders and offering porch deliveries. The following year, as life started returning to normal, the Adrian Meijer started stocking their products. 

But how do you get from packaged spice blends and other dry goods to an entire grocery store? The answer includes the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a nationwide campaign to improve access to healthy food.

In 2022, the Marks Trading Company was awarded a $200,000 grant from the USDA’s Healthy Food Financing Initiative. The program is intended to help grocers start operating in food deserts, which USDA defines as areas where a significant number of residents are low-income and any store selling healthy and affordable foods is relatively far away (1 mile for urban and suburban census tracts, 10 miles for rural ones). That grant paid for a lot of the store’s equipment and has been helping to reduce the up-front burden of stocking up on inventory.

Their North Main Street store opened in August 2022 with limited inventory and has been expanding a piece at a time.

The store’s emphasis is on staying fresh and local.

“We try to source as much locally and regionally as we can, not just for our meat and produce but all of our products,” Jay said.

They’ll only stock a national brand if that’s the only way they can get a certain type of product.

The suppliers are many. Fresh meat and produce come from Mohr Farm in Adrian, Needle-Lane Farms in Tipton, and S&S Family Fresh Produce in Milan. One cooler includes foods from Salsa Bliss and the Hathaway House kitchen in Blissfield. They also carry Blissfield-based Nourish Juicery & Kitchen’s line of vegan and gluten-free soups, salads, and heat-and-eat meals. Many more products come from Walnut Creek, an Amish-owned supplier in Ohio.

On the dry goods shelves are Great Lakes Potato Chips from Traverse City and 313 Urban Chips from Detroit — one of the store’s biggest sellers. Tecumseh-based Harvest Chocolate is another supplier.

“Part of what we’re trying to do with many of the food-based businesses is we want to be kind of an incubator for them,” Jay said. That means providing them with a retail space that has a lower entry barrier than trying to get their products into grocery store chains.

Shoppers can also find canned goods, salad dressings, pasta and sauces, many of them under the Marks Trading Company’s own label. They stock snacks like popcorn and nuts, about 40 kinds of tea, and a bulk foods wall that includes pasta, cereal and granola. And, of course, there are still displays of the spice blends that started it all.

In choosing products, they emphasize quality over quantity. “We won’t have 10 different kinds of green beans; we’ll have one kind of green bean,” Jay said. “But the focus is to have the best quality that we can.”

One novel offering can be found along the back wall of the store, where customers can grind their own peanut butter. There’s also a machine where people can mill their own oats, which Jay said yields “probably the creamiest oatmeal you will ever taste.”

The next additions will be dairy products from Toft Dairy in Sandusky, Ohio, and bread and other baked goods from Grand River Bakery in Manchester.

There are a few misconceptions people often have when they step into a store like Marks Trading Company, which doesn’t really look like a traditional supermarket. One, Gwynne said, is that they’re a health food store. They’re not; you can find candy and other less-than-healthy indulgences if that’s what you’re looking for. They’re also not all-organic.

And then there’s price. At its size, the store can’t get its prices as low as the biggest supermarkets. But the Markses know that they’ll be of more service to the community if they aren’t just a high-priced specialty store. In fact, although they emphasize quality, they don’t consider themselves a specialty store at all, and one of their goals is to keep prices competitive enough that people can afford to shop there.

“The goal,” Jay said, “is that you come in and you can get everything you need for a meal.”

The Marks Trading Company is at 220 N. Main St., Adrian. Store hours are Wednesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.