Imagine how you'd feel, if you were Rod or Barbara Escobar.
You and two other families pool your savings and open the prettiest and biggest health food store the Baltimore-Washington region has seen -- with 7,000 square feet-plus of all-organic veggies and fruits, hundreds of cosmetics that have never been tested on animals, and fresh muffins made on premises with whole grains, no sugar.
You open B. Gordon's Market in one of the state's most prosperous commercial districts -- just off Rockville Pike in Montgomery County -- and things are going great. Then BAM! The first health food store chain started by grocery store professionals opens its premier store, more than twice as large, across the street from you.
Called Fresh Fields, it is even more beautiful, with piped-in music, incandescent spotlights bathing the fruit, and a bakery where everything is made from scratch.
It may not be all-organic, but it is set up for one-stop shopping. Health food purists who balk even at having a seafood section will be startled to see the huge selection of meats and cheeses at Fresh Fields.
Fresh Fields, in sum, is a "category killer" -- a store that changes the retail landscape by eliminating the need to go to one or more smaller specialty stores.
The owners, meanwhile, are aggressive, tough-skinned, and able demand large discounts from big health food distributors because of their huge volume.
We're talking about loss leaders like Veggie Pockets -- various vegetarian fillings wrapped up in an organic wheat crust. Fresh Fields is selling these nouveau fast-food items for $1.29, vs. $1.89 at some of the smaller stores. It has been enough to bring some dedicated organic customers down from Baltimore.
B. Gordon's is nice, it's friendly, and it's currently the state's only certified organic retailer.
But Fresh Fields gives new meaning to the word slick.
Its founding force is Leo Kahn, who started, built and sold a major New England grocery store chain, Purity Supreme. At the same time he is revolutionizing health food, Mr. Kahn is building category killers in the office supply field as co-founder of the Staples chain.
"You look at that store, and you don't think, 'Here's a guy who probably got taken by his general contractor,' " said Moses Brown, owner of Village Market Natural Grocer in Pikesville. "You know he knows what he's doing."
Does he. Just look at the traffic pattern. Grocery stores in general put their perishables -- produce, cheese, meats, deli, bakery -- around the perimeter of the store to ensure that you'll enter these departments and buy, no matter on which side of the store you start.
At Fresh Fields, you are irresistibly led through the perishables. Except by going backwards through a checkout lane, there is no way to get to the bakery directly from the entrance. To get there you have to go through produce, and before you reach the checkout you're likely to go through cheese, meat, salad bar and deli as well.
What's beginning to happen to Maryland's natural foods industry has already happened in other well-off urban areas such as Los )) Angeles and Boston.
The mom-and-pop health food store is being jostled aside by the natural foods supermarket, a store three to 10 times larger than what used to be called large: the 4,000-square-foot health food store.
So far, this growth has been relatively steady, but it's possible Fresh Fields may set a faster pace.
These are "guys who are used to dealing in really big quantities," said Frank Lampe, editor of the industry's leading trade journal, Natural Foods Merchandiser, published in Boulder, Colo.
For starters, he says, there is no way you could put up a store like Fresh Fields for less than $2 million. That easily puts the investment for the first four stores at $8 million to $10 million, he says.
Each Fresh Fields store, with more than 100 employees, will have to gross at least $200,000 a week just to break even, Mr. Lampe said. That works out to a minimum of $10 million a year per store, and he figures a gross between that and $15 million per store would be about right.
In contrast, Mr. Brown's 2,200-square-foot Pikesville store did $1.7 million in sales in 1990.
Fresh Fields President Mark Ordan will not say how many stores the company intends to build, but Mr. Lampe said he has heard the company plans at least 40, fanning out from the Washington base. And while Fresh Fields' Chairman Kahn denies he has his eyes on Baltimore, Mr. Lampe advises not to believe it.
Whether Fresh Fields comes to Baltimore or not, it clearly is moving quickly to claim the greater Washington area as its turf -- making it nearly untouchable by any other health food chain. Only seven months after the May 27 opening in Rockville, the company has already opened a similar store a few miles away in high-rent Bethesda. And it will soon have two suburban Virginia stores -- a 17,000-foot standard model in Tyson's Corner in February and a 32,000-foot giant in Annandale in April.
"That is just a basic marketing tenet," Mr. Lampe said. "The first person in, unless they're total doofuses, will always have major market share."
He says other players who were considering moving into the Baltimore-Washington area have dropped out because of Fresh Fields, and the arrival of Fresh Fields has spurred activity by other big players in other Eastern states.
In November, for example, Whole Foods Markets, a large health food chain based in Austin, Texas, made its first move into the East, buying two big stores in North Carolina.
Massachusetts-based Bread & Circus, another one of the big-store chains, "is planning on doing some expanding, and perhaps their growth plans have been stimulated by somebody like Fresh Fields," Mr. Lampe added.
He explained that Fresh Fields' marketing strategy is to get both the existing health food store customer and the so-called "transition customer." This is the consumer who is becoming concerned about food additives or animal testing but may not be comfortable with the label of "health food nut."
The solution? Go to a store whose slogan, reproduced on tons of printed leaflets covering health food subjects, is "Good for you foods."
"They didn't want to scare anybody away by calling it a health food store or a natural foods store," Mr. Lampe said.
Meanwhile, Rod Escobar said he would like very much to be on friendly terms with his big neighbor, but that seems unlikely.
In the fall, Natural Foods Merchandiser reported that Fresh Fields employees were coming into B. Gordon's to write down its prices so Fresh Fields could shave its own a bit lower. A month ago, both the store manager and the chief buyer for B. Gordon's moved across the street to take jobs at Fresh Fields. On a continuing basis, Mr. Escobar said, Fresh Fields employees have actually come into his store trying to recruit Gordon's workers.
Mr. Ordan could not be reached for comment on this point.
But Mr. Escobar is not sitting around defenseless.
He has hired a health food marketing specialist, Joe Frey, to manage the store on an interim basis and "to help us define our market niche in view of Fresh Fields."
B. Gordon's will keep its store all-organic instead of featuring both non-organic and organic produce, as does Fresh Fields. It is the only state-certified organic food retailer, and the produce manager, Greg Grove, says Gordon's use of the state logo "sells a lot of produce for us. It gives customers confidence they are really getting an organic product."
Meanwhile, B. Gordon's also plans to emphasize customer service by providing counseling in the departments of the store and bringing in nutritionists to give impromptu seminars in its cafe.
Mr. Frey has already improved an awkward entry-exit situation while creating 400 square feet of floor space for a newly expanded Supplements and Personal Care section.
He has hired three salespeople away from his rival. And he has planted at least four new signs along Rockville Pike and the side street, Nicholson Lane, to direct customers into B. Gordon's somewhat hard-to-find parking lot.
At the same time, the word "natural" will be added to the name of the store, making it B. Gordon's Natural Market instead of just B. Gordon's Market.
He acknowledged that the family-owned business made a big mistake in not saying "natural foods" in its name at first. "People walked in and asked for cigarettes," Mr. Escobar said.
But the stops get pulled out about eight weeks from now, when the new sign arrives.
"We met with our landlord and told them we need to get some serious signage -- not just a banner, but something that becomes a landmark," Mr. Escobar said.
It will arrive in late January -- a 25-foot high pylon with the new B. Gordon logo and an arrow pointing the way.