-By Joseph Tarnowski

Store Stats
Number of Stores: 1
Location: Riverside, Calif.
Year Established: 2008
Store Size: 10,000 square feet
Owner: Martin Goodwin
Web Site: www.goodwinsorganics.com

It was supposed to be a tech lab in the form of a store, a handy way for tech guru and grocer Martin Goodwin to test-run his proprietary point-of-sale (POS) system for prospective buyers. But thanks to the singular vision of its owner, the store instead became Goodwin's Organic Foods & Drinks, a real-world experiment in simplifying the delivery of health and wellness to the consumer.

Goodwin, a third-generation grocer with three other, more traditional stores, conceived and built the store around the goal of making eating healthy easy, paring it down to one objective: eating an organic-only diet.

The store attempts to equip consumers with everything they need to accomplish this in a 10,000-square-foot store that offers organic solutions ranging from raw goods to a sit-down meal or takeout dinner. However, another commodity that Goodwin's Organic Foods & Drinks delivers is inspiration, especially for those new to the pursuit of a healthy lifestyle.

"When it comes to 'Vitalize Your Living,' we really mean business," says Goodwin, referring to the store's slogan. "We're really trying to help families to be more healthy, in an easy way -- just by eating, which leads to a healthy, more productive, and better quality of life."

It's a far cry from where Goodwin thought he was headed after he developed his own point-of-sale system. While at first he only planned to sell enough copies of the system to cover the cost of development, demand was so strong internationally that he had to create a company, IT Retail, to accommodate the burgeoning business. He then decided to build a combination store/technology lab to showcase the POS system.

As he began to design the store in the university town of Riverside, Calif., he also happened to be researching organics -- and soon his project veered off onto an ambitious new course.

"I saw that [organics] is a big field," recalls Goodwin, but he saw that it had a lot of unmet potential. He says he searched long and hard for a retailer truly doing a good job of helping customers figure out what's different about organic food, what it is and what it isn't -- but he came up empty. "I visited natural and organic stores. No one was doing it. Who's really helping people to be healthy, and not commercializing it?"

Goodwin resolved to do it himself, with a store that carries only organics, even though he was counseled that it might not be such a smart thing to attempt. "People were warning me not to do it, that you have to have conventional [food], too, or you won't get any sales," he says. "But I thought that if there was a strong educational component as a part of it, the store might work. So I got my family's backing on it, and we went forward."

Goodwin's Organic Foods & Drinks opened Jan. 1, 2008, close to the heart of the University of Calif.-Riverside campus. Goodwin says he created the concept with one goal in mind: "Vitalize Your Living!"

You Are What You Eat
Goodwin's philosophy is simple: Everything you need to attain good health can be found in high-quality, organic food. The obstacle to getting there for many consumers is that they're confused about the difference between organic, natural and conventional foods, and the retail world hasn't been making this any easier.

Goodwin sees it as his mission to educate consumers on how to make organics a part of a healthy lifestyle, and then make it easy for them to find and buy organic food by offering only certified organic products.

Goodwin's resulting retail concept is too unique to label as a supermarket, or perhaps even as a health food store, at least in the traditional sense of those terms.

"It's not really a health food store, and it's not really a grocery store, which is why we call it Organic Foods & Drinks," he notes. "You can have it prepared, or you can buy packaged organic food, or you can have something ready to eat here in one of our seating areas. We offer a cooking class upstairs. And everything in the store is available online -- even the cooking classes."

The store itself is surrounded by orange trees, classic symbols of health that Goodwin has adopted for the store's logo. Two navel orange trees grace the front entrance, and a line of Valencia orange trees borders the parking area in the rear. At each side entrance, Goodwin has also planted orange, lemon and lime trees, which have twisted around each other so that they appear as a single tree bearing all three fruits.

"This whole area is known for citrus, and oranges represent healthy eating, which is why we have them around the store, and on our logo," he says. "Plus, they are a bit of history. The university was started because of the citrus in this area. Sunkist came from here. This whole area was raised up from agriculture, especially oranges, lemons and grapefruit. Even the university has acres of orange trees. And since navel oranges came from Riverside, the two trees in the front are navel oranges."

From the store's threshold, at the center of the building, one is struck by the meticulous care that went into choosing the elements of the design and decor, such as custom wooden gondolas displaying grocery items; plasma screens affixed to the walls in each department to educate shoppers as they browse the aisles, and small, tidy displays of various wares placed throughout the store.

Several varieties of fruit of the same color are arrayed on a single end cap, and like-colored vegetables are grouped together. Such displays are centerpieces in the produce department. In turn, produce is the centerpiece of the store, occupying the position traditionally reserved for dry grocery.

Goodwin says most of the fruits and vegetables are sourced locally. "Romaine from Redlands, lemons from Cucamonga, Valencia oranges from Verona. And we let our shoppers know this, by communicating with them constantly as they make their way through the store.'"

The department is elegantly merchandised, with each type of fruit and vegetable artfully displayed in its own basket within the refrigerated cases. Beyond looks, Goodwin also took pains to find the most energy-efficient refrigerated equipment, eventually selecting Conyers, Ga.-based Hill Phoenix for all of his refrigerated displays.

"You want to display them as nice as you can," says Goodwin. "Shoppers will take the fruit right from here and bring it to the drinks department for an infusion, or to the prepared foods area to add to their meal."

The produce end cap displays are designed to be educational as well as aesthetically pleasing. Goodwin regularly consults with two physicians who recommend fruits and vegetables by color, citing the specific health benefits of each, and every month, the store features a different color, along with information about the health benefits from eating produce in that color group.

Also in produce is a display of Natural Directions, a new line of organic food from Commerce, Calif.-based Unified Grocers -- of which Goodwin's is a member -- that Goodwin says is "very well accepted," and comes in great price points. "[The line] has everything, such as soups, beans, chili and tomato sauce. At first, we put them all on one gondola, but now we're going to display them throughout the store."

Unified also provides Goodwin's reporting, marketing and training, as well as some additional lines of organic products. Other wholesalers that provide products not sourced locally include Nature's Best and Albert's Organics.

Pouring it on
On the right side of the store's perimeter is a stand-alone full-service drinks department where shoppers can get gourmet coffee and espresso, an array of organic teas, or an infusion made with fruit picked from the store's shelves. They can consume their beverages at the drinks counter, or sip contentedly at one of several outside seating areas.

No juices at Goodwin's are from concentrate, as the process destroys the nutritional value of the fruits they're made from, says owner Martin Goodwin.
The coffee program at the store is a good microcosm of Goodwin's retailing approach in practice. Like just about everything else sold in Organic Foods & Drinks, Goodwin is picky about the coffee he carries. Indeed, for health reasons, he almost passed on offering any coffee. "There has always been a lot of controversy around coffee," he says. "Some say it's good for you, some say it's bad. But by using the freshest ingredients around, and by promoting it in healthier ways -- smaller portions, less cream and less sugar -- it works." As a sweetener, Goodwin offers organic raw cane sugar or syrup from the agave plant.

The coffee has a story behind it. "We work with a family business in Upland, Calif., called Coffee Klatch that goes to Central America and puts farmers on an incentive program," explains Goodwin. "They hold contests and judge the coffee, and those with the best-flavored products earn a higher purchase price. They then bring the coffee to their shop, which is about a half-hour or 40 minutes away from the coffee fields, roast the beans there, and then send them to us, and we OEM them and put our labels on them. And it's all Fair Trade coffee as well."

Goodwin's brand, Vitalita, is Italian for "vitalize." In this way, part of Goodwin's slogan is on every bag of coffee beans.

Everything is measured and timed with exacting precision. "We have this down to a science. Our group coordinator/barista, Chris Cayford, and his team exhaustively test all of these beans, because different temperatures, different measurements of water -- we only use purified water -- and different lengths of time affect the flavor. So they evaluate all three of those factors and then they adjust them as they taste them."

On a counter adjacent to the drinks service area is a display featuring an array of organic teas, with samples of each in a jar. "You can feel them, smell them and we can prepare them for you," says Goodwin. "Or you can buy them in bulk."

Across from drinks, packaged coffee -- including Vitalita -- and teas are displayed on one of several custom-made wooden gondolas used throughout the store for merchandising grocery items.

Goodwin's sources branded products typically from small family businesses, a practice in evidence in every department. While the store carries national branded products, they are, of course, all certified organic. Typically, these products are from smaller, family-owned businesses that have been acquired by a national brand, as Burt's Bees was by Clorox.

To show his support for these businesses, Goodwin even merchandises the products by family. "This shows that we are behind them and are marketing their products," he explains.

Hold the Concentrate, and the Hormones
None of the packaged juices sold at Goodwin's are from concentrate, a choice he says he makes to preserve the products' nutritional value.

"When it's from concentrate, it means that they squeeze the pomegranate; then they put them over a flame and boil them to get the water out," he explains. "They do that so they can add back more water, but that heat destroys the nutritional value of the fruit."

And Goodwin is all about nutritional value. He insists he won't sell any products that can harm consumers in any way. "No. 1 of the top three killers is alcohol," he says. "No. 2 is eating wrong. We process so much food and add so many chemicals to it, that the food is killing us.

"Hormones are an example of this. It used to take chickens around 14 weeks to develop; now they are developed in seven or eight weeks, thanks to the use of hormones. And that gets into us."

There are no hormones in the cows that supply milk for Goodwin's dairy products. The dairy section, positioned between produce and the drinks department, prominently features products from two family businesses -- and shoppers know this because Goodwin's tells their stories via videos playing on a plasma screen display right in the department. The videos show how the cows are raised, what they eat, and what else goes into producing organic dairy products at his two suppliers.

The meat department is stocked with all grass-fed beef, sourced from a family-run ranch in Colorado. (Whenever there's a recall involving tainted meat, the department gets mobbed, notes Goodwin.) The chickens, which come from Italy, contain no antibiotics or hormones.

The entire left side of the store is dedicated to prepared foods, everything from organic soups and salads to organic sandwiches and pizza -- all made using ingredients from Goodwin's own shelves.

The department is favored by the entire range of Goodwin's customers, from students grabbing a quick lunch to professors holding meetings that the store caters in the upstairs conference room.

Indeed, the concept has been so popular locally that investors and developers have been knocking on his door to expand. Soon, four more Goodwin's Organic Foods & Drinks will vitalize other Southern California markets -- with two innovative departments added to the mix.