For Masstown, NS-based entrepreneur Laurie Jennings, there’s a lot of love in food. Always has been, always will be.
Throughout the years, the Jennings expanded their farm-gate pit stop—now, Masstown Market is its own destination.
Laurie’s company, Masstown Market, got its start as a farm-gate vegetable stand—but it has evolved into a Colchester County landmark. It’s a traditional ice-cream-and-cinnamon-bun pit stop for people travelling the corridor between Truro and Amherst, encompassing a sprawling, 30,000 square foot farmer’s market complete with a gift store, bakery, deli and ice cream stand, a fish market housed in a lighthouse and an autumn corn maze.
“I’ve heard some people say grocery shopping is a chore, but I’ve never understood that,” Laurie says. “I think grocery shopping should be fun, something you love to do.”
Laurie, of all people, would be the one to say that. Because when he talks about the history of Masstown Market, founded by his father in 1969, story after story flows out of him, all told in a quiet, measured voice that sounds as if he’s smiling.
There are the stories of the market’s earliest days, when his dad, Eric, worked around the clock to grow the vegetables to sell. Laurie remembers his mother, Priscilla, pacing the kitchen floor and staring at the clock. Fifteen minutes past noon: the table set, food ready, the four kids starving, and Priscilla waiting on Eric to come in from the market for lunch. Later, when customers started asking for more products, Laurie remembers his father bringing extras in—sugar to go with strawberries, salad dressing to go with the greens. And then later still, when the market proved a clear success and was large enough to support two generations of Jennings, there’s the story of Laurie, then a young Bachelor of Science graduate from Dalhousie University, who felt drawn back from a life in the city to help his dad run the family business. He still can’t explain why he came back, only that he did.
Calculated risk, and community
Laurie Jennings’ stories about the history of his family business are of hard work, calculated risk, and community. His dad started out in the early 1960s with a 150-acre patch of land that had everything a young farmer needed: a pond, a woodlot, grassland, a farmhouse and outbuildings in good condition. He had grown up on a farm just down the road, and had known for years exactly what he would plant when he finally struck out on his own: strawberries (Masstown was famous for them), lettuce, cabbage, potatoes and carrots. He planted enough to feed his family, and the rest he sold at the local Dominion—he knocked on the door, and showed the store manager the day’s harvest.
In winter he drove a feed truck, travelling from one farm to another, buying grains and selling locally harvested feed for dairy cows and livestock.
A little here, a little there
Eric Jennings had the hands of a farmer and the mind of an entrepreneur. Selling direct to customer was a pretty good way to make a living, he figured. He kept on figuring during the winter, while he did what farmers often do when it’s too cold to grow things: cut wood and saw logs. By spring 1969 he had enough boards ready to build a modest fruit and vegetable stall, funded in part by the Jennings’ family allowance cheques. The family allowance part drove Priscilla crazy. “We were scraping by in the beginning,” Laurie remembers. But Eric, who was also pragmatic, saw it as less risky than borrowing.
Today, Laurie runs the business with his brother Wade, who works in operations. Most days Eric, now 74, will show up for work—there’s plenty of it to go around. In summer, Masstown’s staff peaks at 150 people.
Laurie describes the market’s growth as “a little here, a little there.” Each year the Jennings took on a little more, always living within their means, holding to the classic traditionalist principle of balancing growth with a spirit of caution.
As the business has grown, so too have the accolades; Masstown Market has won two gold awards in specialty retailing from the Canadian Federation of Independent Retailers.
Laurie Jennings is proud of the awards, and proud of how the business has evolved, but the attention makes him blush a little, too.
“The thing I’m proudest of is my staff,” he says. Many of his employees have worked there more than 20 years—they feel like family to him.
When a well-meaning customer told him last winter that he shouldn’t be out shovelling snow because he was “the owner,” Laurie was only slightly more confused than he was embarrassed.
“I wouldn’t ask any one of our employees to do anything I wouldn’t do,” he says.
In truth there’s not a lot at the market that Laurie hasn’t done. He grew up working in it—sweeping up, mopping up, stocking shelves. Laurie remembers lots of days his father would round up the kids and take them to work at the market. “I don’t know if it was that he needed the help or that it was his turn to take the kids to give our mom a break,” he says. Either way, he loved the work—unloading the latest “exotic produce” from a farmer’s truck, back when broccoli was exotic. Trying out the strawberries, the blueberries, the plums, back when it was acceptable to think pineapple came from a can. Watching Ellen Alexander and Grace Murphy—Masstown’s first employees—bag the bread, back when there were just two kinds: white or brown.
Sensory memories of childhood
Last spring, business coach Debbie Lawrence, a longtime Masstown customer, stopped by the market to buy supper for herself and a client. She picked up two bowls of Scotch broth, a traditional beef and vegetable soup. The first spoonful was pure nostalgia. “It tasted just like the soup my grandmother used to make back in Newfoundland,” she says.
From the soups to the breads to the locally grown fruits and vegetables that “don’t look glitzy, but like a real farmer took them out of the ground,” Debbie says that the thing that has kept her coming back to Masstown Market is its ability to conjure the sensory memories of her childhood.
“It’s a total experience—it’s one of the things you have to do when you come here.”
Doug Townsend grew up stopping at Masstown Market when en route from Halifax to the ski hill in Wentworth. Today, as director of marketing at Taste of Nova Scotia, he stops by to take international culinary experts on a tour of what he calls one of Nova Scotia’s “flagship ‘buy local’ businesses.
“They don’t do ‘buy local’ because it’s a trendy thing,” he says. “They do it because it’s something they have always done.” And it is this authenticity, combined with a willingness to experiment and try new things—such as build a lighthouse to house a fish market—that has helped the company not only hold its own with major grocers, but thrive and grow, he says.
Stop apologizing. You’re a great marketer
Masstown Market’s growth has been driven primarily by customer demand, Laurie says. “When our customers asked for something, we did our best to get it.” In the early years, they grew simply by adding new products. In the 1980s, the family built the garden centre, restaurant and bakery. In 2000, they expanded the restaurant and added the deli. In 2004, another expansion included a gift store, and three years later, the market grew again to include a Nova Scotia Liquor Commission outlet. In 2009, the Jennings opened a second location in Five Islands. The following year they expanded the Masstown bakery and built the lighthouse fish market.
Throughout it all, the family has maintained its tradition of offering fine local products at a reasonable price.
For Laurie, “buying local” isn’t just about purchasing produce from farmers who live in the same region as you; it’s about naming names. Give him five minutes and he can rattle off dozens of growers—their names, where they live, how long they’ve been farming, and what they grow best.
The Jennings got out of farming years ago, when things got so busy at the market they could no longer keep up with the harvest. For years afterwards, when he gave tours of the operation, Laurie would apologize that he was no longer a farmer. “I just felt so guilty about it,” he says.
And then one day, a farmer stopped him and told him to quit apologizing. “You’re not a farmer. You’re a great marketer. That’s what we need.”
But buying local, Jennings’ style isn’t just about farmers, it’s about customers. Laurie greets them all by name. He speaks about them with gratitude and respect. Grocery shopping shouldn’t be a chore, it should be fun. Because for the Jennings family, there’s a lot of love in food. Always has been, always will be.