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Sunday, Jul. 12, 2009

Mennonite marketplace opens in East Dublin

EAST DUBLIN — In Tim Horst and Doug Martin’s store, you’ll find bottles of farm-fresh honey, bags of peas shelled right in the back and jars of jellies, jams and relishes shipped in from Amish country in Ohio.

Shoppers also can find many of the same goods and household items carried at other groceries — they just might not always be the same name brands or cost as much.

But don’t come looking for cigarettes or beer.

“None of that,” Horst said grinning.

The partners, who hail from the nearby Mennonite community in eastern Laurens County, opened Discount Grocery and Farm Market about two months ago in a former used car business on Central Drive, the city’s main drag.

“Our grocery lines are the discount stuff,” said Horst. “Surplus items, the closeouts.”

While some shoppers certainly have come for the bargain hunting, the big draw so far has been the fresh produce, especially the peas shelled on site.

“Right now we’re shelling every day. We’re having a hard time keeping up,” said Horst.

The store can shell up to 100 bushels a day, two bushels at a time. The peas are poured into the drums of a machine called Roto-Fingers, The drums spin in one direction, while beaters inside spin in the other.

The hulls are dumped on the floor, while the peas stay put. They are poured into another machine, called The Eliminator Pea Cleaner, which separates pieces of hull that remains. The peas are then picked through by hand and bagged.

Horst said he expects different varieties of peas to be available though the summer. Butterbeans, though, have been hard to come by, perhaps because the rainy, then hot weather made for a poor crop. The store briefly carried fresh sweet corn but sold out fast.

“It’s over for the year,” Horst said.

The store’s stock of local honey has been another popular item. The honey is harvested from Horst’s brother-in-law’s bee farm and comes in gallberry or wildflower varieties. It’s sold in amounts ranging from one pound for $3.69 to a gallon jug for $25.99.

Lisa Mullis of Dublin picked up a jar last week. She prefers the pure, local honey for its purported health benefits. And, she said, “it’s good.”

“I shop here because of the local stuff, like the honey, that they carry,” she said.

The store is Horst’s second venture into the grocery business. The first carried homemade cakes, and he and Martin hope to eventually add a deli and full-scale bakery at the new place.

“People just love that local, homemade stuff,” Horst said.

Curtis Warnock stopped by last week to pick up a few items. He doesn’t shop a lot and said he was surprised after an earlier visit with his wife when she pointed out they had saved about 50 percent on the order.

“It’s a good store, good service,” said Warnock. “It’s something the community needed for a while. When there’s only one grocery store over here, they can do just about whatever they want to.”

The store’s staff, and a good many of its customers, are Mennonite. On a day last week, women wearing traditional long dresses and caps ran cash registers and cleaned and bagged peas, while others browsed the grocery aisles.

Horst and Martin decided in March to open the grocery and spent about two months converting the building into a store.

The former tenant, Classic Motors, was known to display a huge, inflatable gorilla in the parking lot.

Horst joked about breaking out the gorilla.

“I think it’s in a box up there,” Martin said.

To contact writer Rodney Manley, call 744-4623.