by Mark McDermott
GROW, the family-owned farm-fresh produce market and grocery store, came into being two decades ago with a fairy tale by the beach beginning.
The story was that in 2003, a little boy named Brendan Fisher, freshly arrived from the Central Valley to Manhattan Beach, quite naturally hoped to become an ocean-going kid. He wanted a boogie board. But he didn’t have the money. So he made a deal with his parents, Barry and Kathy Fisher. Brendan, who was 5 at the time, would raise half the money himself, and his parents would match. Brendan used what resources he had, which included the fact that his dad was in the agricultural export business. He obtained the very best cherries grown in California, then set up a little curbside stand. His cherries sold like gangbusters.
His dad was proud, of course, but his son’s cherry stand also gave him an idea. Maybe, he thought, Manhattan Beach needs a truly fresh produce market. And so in 2006, he and his wife Kathy opened GROW market on Sepulveda Boulevard.
As time went on and GROW grew, becoming one the most locally beloved small businesses in the South Bay (winning ten Best of the Beach awards in a row), the Fisher’s daughter, Megan, took slight issue with its oft-told origin story. Her big brother did open that little cherry stand, but he had some help – Megan, who was 3 at the time, was Brendan’s first and best customer. She deserved a little credit for GROW, too.
“She always like to point out,” Barry recalled, “‘Hey, I ate a lot of those cherries that first day.’”
The truth is that GROW was always a fully Fisher family store. This fact is part of the deep sadness that Barry Fisher felt last week when he announced that GROW was closing after 19 years in business, and the deeper pride he will carry forward knowing that his kids literally grew up as part of GROW, becoming part of a larger community and thoughtful, kind, and enterprising young adults in the process.
“I think the greatest thing that we got out of this was that we raised two kids with an excellent work ethic and great appreciation for food,” Fisher said. “Each will carry both of those two traits for the rest of their lives. But also, working in the store, they also learned empathy, which is something that I think is very important. The store has helped us all be in on the idea of economic success. It’s really helped shape our children, and I think gave them traits they are going to carry for the rest of their lives.”
GROW was an economic success. It began with a carefully curated but wide selection of mostly family farm and orchard-grown produce, and it kept growing, expanding its offering to include meat, fish, dairy, cheeses, an array of the very best “middle aisle” packaged goods, and even pre-prepared meals based on Kathy’s own recipes and marinades (all of which she freely shared with customers). Eventually, GROW also offered a delivery service. The store doubled in size and opened a second location in downtown Los Angeles.
But even as GROW expanded, it remained true to the idea that animated its origin.
“My grandmother says she only shops the walls at a grocery store,” Fisher said in an interview two years ago. “And you think about an old grocery store. It was the produce department, it was the dairy, it was the meat, it was the fish. And I kind of love it that GROW is basically the walls of that grocery store…It’s all the healthiest things, the right items your family needs, and it’s all high quality products.”
If GROW was based on his grandmother’s idea of a grocery store, it kept growing because of the Fisher kids. They went from its inspiration to partners in its success, a fact brought into stark relief during the pandemic, when all four of the Fisher family worked daily from early morning till late at night, reconfiguring GROW on the fly into a delivery service unparalleled in the South Bay for its swiftness and accuracy.
Barry Fisher remembered that first fraught weekend during the initial lockdown, in March 2020. He was chomping at the bit to start delivering, but his kids were the voice of caution, noting that they didn’t even have a good idea of their own inventory, nor the workforce to implement delivery.
“It was that first weekend of Covid when all the hoarding started,” Fisher recalled. “We had turned home delivery off, and I wanted to turn it back on, and the kids were like, ‘No, it has to be organized, because we don’t even know what groceries we have anymore…We can’t fall down.’”
Together, they came up with a plan. It was like a triage unit. Barry was contacting all his growers and meat suppliers, and figuring out ways to keep the goods coming. Megan was organizing the store’s reopening for pickups as soon as the new week began. Brendan, meanwhile, was researching software for a better delivery system. Kathy, as always, was the glue holding everything together. When they announced they would be open for pickup, with orders by 6 p.m. ready by noon the next day, they had 75 orders almost immediately. It was a long night, the first of many to come. Within a week, GROW had dialed in the best delivery service in the area. Because it wasn’t just a computer, but a family that was making sure the orders were filled.
Fisher remembers one older man who called, with actual terror in his voice. His son had ordered from a big store via Instacart the previous day and the only thing that ended up coming was rice and coffee. He had no food and was scared. Kathy took the order, and the man kept asking, “Do you promise?”
“Yes,” she said. “We promise.”
“He has no food and he can’t go out because he’s older. He was very scared,” Fisher said. “Thirty minutes later, I actually dropped the order off on his front step. He had a check, and he’s like, ‘Stand back,’ and I watch him roll it up into a ball and toss it toward me, saying ‘Thank you.’”
This would not have happened if not for the Fisher kids.
“It was the kids who really managed that and made it successful,” Fisher said. “We got up to 120 deliveries a day…We were doing 5 to ten a day before the pandemic.”
One memory is etched in Fisher’s mind.
“I remember one day opening the garage door at 6:30 in the morning, and all four of us are just really tired,” Fisher said. “We all have our GROW shirts on, and we get into Kathy’s car and, and there’s some neighbors in the alley and they’re working out because they have to stay home. They can’t go anywhere. Everyone’s at home relaxing, and we’re enabling that. And we’re enabling them to be safe.”
Fisher said that if this had just been a business, he’d have closed the store after the pandemic. The numbers were not adding up. Yet the loyalty and deep bonds the Fishers felt from their customers during the pandemic gave him hope that somehow GROW could survive.
“I think we felt a lot of excitement, because we thought, ‘Okay, people appreciate a store like this. People found us again, and we have an opportunity to build something special in the community,’” Fisher said. “But it just didn’t work out that way.”
The reality was that the store’s earlier economic success had become impossible to regain as corporate competition increased. When GROW opened, it essentially had no competition for its brand of higher-end fresh produce and groceries. The massive Whole Foods flagship store in El Segundo didn’t yet exist, and the Gelson’s Market a few miles down the road in Manhattan Beach wasn’t even a glimmer in a developer’s eye, nor was Lazy Acres down the road in Hermosa. And while none of these stores offered the farmer’s market level of freshness or the family-style attention to its customers like GROW, what they had was a huge economy of scale. Fisher grew so accustomed to fighting giants that he became almost inured to the exhaustion that accompanied such a battle.
“You know, you keep working uphill, working uphill, working uphill,” Fisher said. “But there’s a downhill side, too. It doesn’t have to be that way. The last two years have been really hard on us, and I think we are tired of pushing uphill. We don’t have a massive corporation standing behind us, no deep pockets. Gelson’s, Lazy Acres, Bristol Farms, they are all owned by foreign companies now, who are all very good retailers in their own countries. Whole Foods is owned by the largest retailer in the world, Amazon. It’s tough. It’s just hard, day in and day out, to try to compete with these massive corporations.”
Fisher finally realized it was time to call it quits earlier in July when a longtime employee asked for some time off to manage personal matters. GROW has a staff of 11. The Fishers had been planning a little getaway, and Barry realized he’d have to stay – there was no other way to cover. More significantly, he realized he and Kathy could no longer survive this ongoing uphill fight. He took her to the airport and went home and started planning the end of GROW. They’d already sold off the DTLA store last year. Last week, he and Kathy sent out an email to their customers announcing the store’s closure.
“It was time to rip the bandaid off,” Fisher said. “It wasn’t the employee’s fault. It’s been a lot of time and effort. This was kind of just the straw that broke the camel’s back. We’re physically done.”
Within 30 minutes of sending the email, a customer who’d shopped at GROW since its very beginning came to the store in tears. She recalled a Thanksgiving one year in which for health reasons she wasn’t allowed to have citrus, which meant that she wouldn’t be able to follow her annual tradition and order a brined turkey from GROW, because Kathy’s brine recipe included citrus. But the Fishers took the time, in the midst of brining 120 turkeys, to make a different, citrus-less recipe for one. The woman was able to enjoy her Thanksgiving turkey from GROW after all.
“She was like, ‘No other store would do that for me,’” Fisher said. “And she’s right. She’d be hard pressed to find somebody to do something like that. So those are the kinds of things that a lot of customers are talking about – about their kids being raised here on food from GROW, their kids working for us, just wishing we could stay. Unfortunately, we just can’t.”
Fisher said that while the store maintains an incredibly loyal customer base, there’s been a demographic shift GROW has not been able to absorb.
“Our old customer base was my age, and they had kids at one point,” he said. “Now, they’ve gone off to college and graduated and they’re no longer stomachs to fill. There’s not enough stomachs to fill in our customer base. And so I think that’s really a challenge we’ve had. We’ve just not been able to get that next generation in the store.”
The two Fisher kids have flown the coop themselves. Each has started a promising business career of their own, Brendan in LA and Megan in Seattle. But they will both be back for GROW’s final days, the first weekend of August – if there is anything left to sell after everything goes on deep discount this week. If not, Fisher has a backup plan so the family can have one last moment together in the store they helped build, and grow, together.
“It’s something we need to do,” Fisher said. “And if for some crazy reason we are done early, we’ve got a card table here we’ll unfold, and we’ll have dinner together in the empty store.” ER
