TUPELO • As a full-line health food store, Whole Family Nutrition and Market has been a mecca for 30 years for those seeking natural products.
In a nutshell, “We’re a family owned, independent, natural health food store with vitamins, supplements, sports nutrition and very nice food market,” said Warren Barbieri, who, with his wife Michelle, acquired the business from his mother in 2005.
Whole Family started as a small shop attached to a gym in Pontotoc in 1991. Warren had a background in the natural food business and in the food industry, and Michelle is a certified health coach. They combined their talents to run the Pontotoc store and later open a location in Tupelo.
“We went through a series of moves in Pontotoc for bigger space until our last move to where we are now,” Warren said.
The Barbieris opened a Tupelo location on McCullough Boulevard a few years later.
“We had a lot of customers who came over from Tupelo and shopping with us,” Warren said. “We opened up in January of 2012, so we’re coming up on our 10th anniversary this January.”
But it didn’t take long to outgrow the McCullough location, and in 2016, the store opened in a new and larger building. The tornado of 2014 severely damaged what was a bingo business at North Green and North Gloster streets, and when the facility was rebuilt, the bingo business had moved, and Planet Fitness became the anchor tenant.
“V.M. Cleveland, who owned the building, some space available next to it,” Warren said. “He’s a customer of ours, and we talked about it, and then we were able to move into it in 2016. It’s been a good thing. It’s given us the opportunity to grow and add more products and categories. We’re probably three times larger than what we were on McCullough.”
The most significant affect of moving to a larger space was allowing the Barbieris to add coolers and freezers, which has allowed them to offer one of the largest organic food selections in this part of the state.
Getting through the pandemic
Like many small businesses, navigating the COVID-19 pandemic was a challenge.
While Whole Family Nutrition and Market was deemed an essential business, allowing it to stay open even as other businesses had to close, keeping a careful balance of serving the public and keeping everyone healthy was far from easy.
“It took the community to help us get through it,” Warren said. “We appreciate the customers who supported us because we had to put measures in place to protect us.”
The Barbieris followed local, state and federal guidelines on masking and social distancing. Most customers complied, although some didn’t. The store did lose a few customers who refused or declined to follow them.
“We wanted to accommodate everybody as best we could,” Michelle said. “We followed the CDC guidelines because was felt it was the right thing to do, and we had people who appreciated it. We have customers with life-threatening illnesses and they’re coming in to find nutrition to help them ... they felt safe and protected. We had some issues with people who didn’t believe in wearing masks, and we tried to understand their point of view, but it made it difficult to help those who needed help sometimes as we had to deal with some of the conversations about the mask. But we made it through and I wanted to jump up and down.”
The store never closed completely, but it did restrict access for a few weeks doing only curbside business during the height of the pandemic.
“I’ve never worked harder in my life,” Warren said, describing the long days of working and filling orders at the Tupelo store then going to Pontotoc to fill that store in the evenings.
“We were blessed to have a great staff who did a tremendous job through it all,” he said.
Changing customers
Whole Family Nutrition and Market has been affected by the internet just like any other retailer, but the Barbieris see a silver lining in the clouds.
“When I started working in a retail store, there was a lot of one-on-one education as they came in, teaching them about health, immune systems, natural remedies,” Michelle said. “As the years have gone by, with the internet and Amazon taking over, things have shifted and changed. It’s more of people wanting information but still shopping online. So that changed how we had to do business.”
Warren says the internet, despite its obvious impact on retail brick-and-mortar, has had some positive impact.
“In the early days it was a race to the bottom on pricing,” he said. “Online sites in the beginning didn’t have to collect sales tax, but we did, so it was a very unfair situation. But we’ve leveled the playing field there. And these large companies have gotten a handle on who there selling their products to. There aren’t these people that just open up their garages and start selling their products. A lot of third-party vendors particularly the ones that carry high-quality brand-recognition products, have stopped that. So in a lot of cases we’re not only competitive on pricing, we’re cheaper.”
And having been shuttered in place for weeks and months, the post-pandemic buying public is happy to be back in the stores shopping.
“People are doing to continue shopping online because it’s convenient,” he said. “But people also miss coming in and shopping. We’re one of those destinations that people come in and see old friends, and they can also get what they want right then. So it’s evolved to that but I think the future for folks like us will be good.
“I think health and immune health are more important than ever and we’ve seen people we haven’t seen before,” he said. “People are saying that want to make changes and that’s what we’re for.”
