Jim Mason, in jeans and untucked shirt, doesn't look like the CEO of a burgeoning gourmet market chain as he tells me a story about his childhood. He remembers back to when he was a kid and his mom would call down to the local butcher shop and tell them what kind of meat she wanted. "She never felt the need to go down and look at what she was getting," explains Mason, "because she knew someone would be picking it out for her. She knew it would be good." Not only would the meat be good, but it would be delivered that afternoon.
From Mason, standing at the front of his new Messineo's Market in downtown St. Petersburg, it doesn't sound like an oft-repeated and refined anecdote that's more about branding than memory. It sounds wistful. And as he looks around the store after repeating it, Mason looks happy and hopeful about what he's created.
Beautiful, well-stocked and full of tasty food it may be, but don't think of Messineo's as a gourmet paradise or a saving grace for lovers of organic and natural foods. It can fill both those roles, but at its heart this market is the kind of neighborhood place that Mason was riffing about in his story. It's small, and that's kind of the point.
When he was a manager at Wild Oats, before its merger in 2007 with Whole Foods, Mason saw the chain stores getting bigger and bigger. "I wanted to be able to see someone walk in the door and know who they are, know what they're looking for and what they like," he says. And even though Messineo's has only been open about a week, that's just what happens a few minutes later, as he beelines away from me to talk to an incoming customer he knows by name.
That's the benefit of both an independent business model and the size of Mason's store — around 5,000 square feet compared to the 50,000-plus of a Whole Foods. Call it intimate, sure, but you can pack a lot of food into that small space.
Messineo's bread selection, like most of the food here, comes from a variety of different suppliers, both local and national. Mason likes to pick and choose what he feels is the best available without getting tied into an exclusive relationship with a single purveyor. It's more difficult for him to deal with the sheer number of different vendors, but it also provides a cushion against his competition. He doesn't have to have the lowest prices, necessarily, if he's giving people something that they can't get elsewhere.
Besides the baked goods, there's the ubiquitous row of foods prepared in-house, from chicken salad to slabs of rare tuna, classic lunch and dinner fare for people too busy to cook for themselves. Next to that is the meat section, with slabs of gorgeous red beef and pale chickens, all of it hormone-free and naturally raised. Fish is arrayed on a bed of ice, some of the flesh glistening and perfect, others with a duller tint. Then there's the crab legs on a bed of ice as big as the rest of the seafood section, $4.99 a pound every day.
He's as proud of that as he is the produce section, which is big enough to fulfill most ingredient lists without dominating the store. The items are packed dry in bins, artful but practical, and Mason breaks out in a defense of not using misters and sprayers. Here the staff hydrates the produce by hand and, according to him, nothing ever stays out long enough to wilt in the air-conditioned store air.
The real "gourmet" section of the store is the dry goods, racks loaded with bottles of strawberry balsamic vinegar, imported cans of tomatoes, artsy tortilla chips. Bulk goods are stored in big glass apothecary jars, with a staff member to scoop and bag for you (I get the impression that Mason doesn't care for the unhygienic aspects of self-service). There are a lot of gluten-free goods, soon to be marked with tags so people with that particular culinary concern — a growing segment of the market, according to Mason — will be able to pick wisely. Those signs aren't up yet, though. In fact, there are precious few signs in the store.
Although Mason ordered menu boards to be mounted on the walls and lists of ingredients for the bulk goods, he told his sign company to stall. "We have a list of sandwiches," he explains, "but we already have so many requests we want to change it." He plans to let the customers determine the direction for the store, both in the early days and down the long haul.
Messineo's is neat, convenient to people who work or live in downtown St. Pete, and carries food that looks the match of any supermarket or other gourmet food store. Not a destination by any means — like Mazzarro's a few miles away, or Datz Deli in Tampa — but that's not part of Mason's business plan. He has three delivery trucks that can drop off everything from a few sandwiches for an office lunch to a full selection of groceries. Soon, you'll be able to order everything online, tag it for delivery and not even get out your credit card until the driver brings in your packages, thanks to mobile card processing machines.
Maybe that's not the same as calling up the butcher and putting the weekly pot roast on your tab, but it's damn close.
This article appears in Jul 8-14, 2010.