“We’re closer to opening than we’ve ever been,” said Rick Molitor, co-owner of The Market in St. Joseph, with a wry smile and tongue-in-cheek.
After two years of delays, false-starts, battles for permits, and a long renovation amid a global pandemic, The Market is now making its final preparations to open for business early fall this year.
The Market, 301 Main Street in St. Joseph, will be a year-round indoor farmers market featuring a variety of permanent vendors focused on food and drink. The Cheese Lady at The Market announced it will be open for business on Spet. 21, and other businesses will be opening independently near then.
Each of the eight confirmed vendors are finishing custom-built spaces for their business, and two spaces remain available for lease. Confirmed businesses include:
The Cheese Lady
Dad’s Farm
Dad’s Cafe
Infusco Coffee
St. Joe Community Taproom
St. Joe Wine Shoppe
The Tea Annex
Wild Ginger Florist and Gifts
The Market co-owners, Rick Molitor and Debbie Sailor, first came to southwest Michigan from Illinois to open Jimmy John’s franchises, which they operated for 15 years before going into semi-retirement.
“When we sold Jimmy Johns, I said, ‘I would never, ever, do food again, and I would never, ever, do a franchise again,” Sailor said.
That changed when the couple took a trip to Traverse City with some friends and wandered into The Cheese Lady location there. The Cheese Lady is a small, Michigan-based retail franchise offering 150 artisan cheeses from all over the world with eight locations throughout the state.
Sailor began sampling cheeses and quickly tallied a $60 bill, while she later fell in love with the business’s community focus and the franchise owners’ good nature.
Just when Sailor was approved to purchase a franchise from The Cheese Lady, the building she originally wanted to operate her new business in was sold, and the building at 301 Main Street caught her attention. The building was much larger than what she needed for her individual business, and that’s when the vision for a community marketplace started to take form.
“We hope The Market can be a sort of business incubator for local entrepreneurs,” Molitor said. “Most of our business-owners are young. It’s a good scale for someone to get a business started and manageable for a first-timer.”
Ashlee Hacker, a Berrien county native whose family has been farming in the area since the 1940s, is the owner of two separate but complementary businesses at the Market: Dad’s Farm, a fresh produce stand, and Dad’s Cafe, a full-service restaurant.
Hacker connected with Debbie Sailor and Rick Molitor when she worked for them as a Jimmy John’s delivery driver.
Hacker recently hired Shavarr Goodloe, Benton Harbor native and graduate of Lake Michigan College’s culinary and hospitality management program, to help her run Dad’s Cafe as sous-chef. Goodloe also owns a cheesecake and dessert business, Shef Lyfe Creations, which will be featured at Dad’s Cafe.
St. Joe Wine Shoppe owner Meredith George will be selling specialty wine, focusing on wines that are organic, sustainable, biodynamic and made by women winemakers.
“We want to make wine more approachable to people,” George said “Our goal is to create a warm, inviting space for every wine drinker, offering them thoughtful and dynamic wines.”
St. Joe Community Taproom will be serving local craft beer, a selection of regional, national, and international craft beer, as well as draft wine, cocktails, ciders, mead and seltzers.
“Our mission is to support our local craft beverage makers by passionately promoting their products in our unique market setting, where locals and visitors alike are able to experience the best flavors southwest Michigan has to offer here, together,” said Kelly Vega, St. Joe Community Taproom owner.
St. Joe Community Taproom will have seating for 49 people including bar seating, counter seating with laptop charging stations, a cozy mezzanine overlooking the rest of The Market, outdoor patio seating.
St. Joe Community Taproom has a few “permitting and licensing hurdles” to overcome, and has not announced an open date.
Getting the building ready to serve a multi-business operation of this scale took a lot of effort.
“It was hard to see the vision of the building at first, with the drop ceiling and two layers of insulation,” Molitor said. “After we bought the building, we didn’t really start plotting out the space until the demolition was done.”
Molitor’s son, Cameron, removed 42 dumpsters of material to strip the building down to its bones.
“Rick and I fought with the architect, the structural engineer and the city for months about what we needed to do to bring the building up to date,” Sailor said.
We finally got working on it late January 2020, and then COVID hit, so we got shut down.”
Then the building inspector retired, and the new building inspector decided she wanted to review everything and made us stop work for six weeks. After she reviewed everything she got a plan back to us and none of it made sense, so we had to get everybody back in the building again to figure out what was what.”
Columns were added to the building for structural support. Some of the large barrel-roof trusses had to be rebuilt, which took several months. A skylight was added. Garage bay doors were added to the side of the building. Plumbing, electric and HVAC were all redone.
“We figure we’ve added about another 100 years of life to the building,” Molitor said. “There was way more work than we anticipated. I was thinking it would take a year, and we’re at two.”
Delays in material and labor added up too. Like, it took six weeks to get the tile we wanted. The story was, we would get a guy to do the work, and we can’t get the materials. Then when we get the materials in, we can’t get the guy to do the work.”
And now that we’re going to open, and I think we’re going to find pretty quickly that there’s no staffing available. It’s definitely been an adventure.”
