We were lucky to catch up with Pam Sandy recently and have shared our conversation below.

Pam, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

At our store and farm we try to put ourselves in our customer’s shoes and think like a customer. versus thinking about what is most convenient or profitable for us. We are a business of course, but we think about our customers and vendors first. What would we find helpful, convenient, or comforting, would make their lives easier? My family and I work really hard to source products from small businesses in our community and state, or other small family operated businesses. It is definitely time consuming to do this and sometimes a bit more expensive, but the fact that we are helping to support another family or small business matters a LOT to us, and to our customers as well. Additionally, by doing this we are usually able to provide much more unique and high-quality products than big box stores can provide. We use fresh ingredients in our food and cook from scratch to ensure we are serving not only delicious food, but high-quality food that is free from preservatives and fillers. This is much more labor intensive and expensive than just purchasing frozen food that can be reheated in the microwave. We also try to provide a large variety of items in our store, even though it is fairly small.

Our store is located in the Manistee National Forest, and there are no other businesses nearby. The next closest store or place to get takeout food is about 15 – 20 minutes away. When we purchased the store two and a half years ago we made it a priority to order fresh from local or small vendors.
Immediately we tried to order a delicious product from a small vendor located in Traverse CIty, which is about 45 minutes from our store. We absolutely loved the product and were sure our customers would love it as well. We are definitely located off the beaten path though, so the vendor wasn’t sure they could fiscally swing making deliveries to our store. Would it be worth their time? It took us numerous phone calls, emails, and messages to finally earn the opportunity to carry the product in our store on a temporary basis to see how things went. I am happy to say we now regularly place orders with this vendor. They have told us we are an anomaly, they can’t believe how well their product does at our store in the middle of the forest. One of the other things I love about this is when they deliver our order they usually purchase a product from us that is made in a town 20 minutes from our store. They never knew about this other small business, they discovered it by coming to our store. By sourcing from small businesses we have introduced products to people who may not have ever run across them before. I love this!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My family and I have always worked hard. We have owned businesses in the past and have also worked in the food service industry and retail. We love northern Michigan and wanted to make it our permanent home. We had a little cabin up north we visited, but decided to make the change and move here permanently. When we bought our small farm we never dreamed we would also end up purchasing a small general store in the middle of the forest. Our daughter and her family wanted to move to the area too, so our family’s various skill sets came together and helped us to renovate and re-energize our small store. We all felt very strongly about providing excellent customer service, and supporting other small businesses. We have worked incredibly hard to renovate and upgrade our business in order to provide the best service and products we can for our customers. We expanded our food offerings to include made from scratch hot food items every day. We use antibiotic free grass fed beef raised on a local farm on our pizzas, in our calzones, and our other food. We brought in dairy products from another local farm, fresh veggies from other local farmers, and clothing and gift items from local and other small businesses who do not sell on Amazon. We greatly expanded our craft beer and beverage selection, increased our bourbon and distilled in Michigan products, and added a variety of other made in Michigan food items and products. As a small general store we try to have the basics available as well as provide fresh food, and unique items. We have put a lot of elbow grease and love into improving the store’s appearance and functionality. We hired local contractors to do repairs and improvements that were above our expertise level. A lot of work was necessary! We have met so many amazing people since having the store, many of our customers and vendors have become dear friends. We try our best to listen to our customers, and to supply what we can that makes it convenient for them to shop in our store. It has not been easy, but it has been worthwhile. We derive great joy when people stop in and tell us they love the store, and they will be back. As any small business owner or operator can probably tell you, it has definitely been hard work. I think by caring about our customers and community we have been cared for too. We are very grateful!

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

I think people have been able to visually see how much we care about our customers and what hard workers we are. Many of our customers stop in and tell us they haven’t been in the store in years but they drive by occasionally on their way to somewhere else and have noticed all the work we have done to improve the store. They see the colorful new sign, the neat and tidy appearance, the beautiful flowers in the planters, and flower box, mums and pumpkins in the fall, and the new seating area outside. They also notice that the parking lot is usually occupied instead of empty. They have heard from friends or relatives that it is worth the drive to come see us in the middle of the forest, as we carry a wide variety of items now and we prepare fresh delicious food every day. Word of mouth has been huge for us, we are blessed to have customers who are great champions for the store. They have shopped in the store and shared their experiences with others. When people can see what you are doing and hear positive things about it from others they usually want to check it out too.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

So we don’t manufacture things but we do make fresh hot food from scratch that is available as take out. We “manufacture” our recipes and offerings by testing them out on our customers before we put them on our menu or make them available as daily meal deals. There are sooooo many prepared frozen food options for small general stores or convenience store, but we did not want to go that route. When we purchased the store the prior owners used to offer microwaved frozen precooked burgers and breakfast sandwiches made with frozen precooked eggs and sausage. They also offered frozen pizza, they would take frozen toppings and add them to the frozen premade pizza base and cook the pizzas one at a time in the small store oven. They also offered cold subs and sandwiches made with presliced deli style meat. Occasionally they would cook brats or some type of soup and have it available for their customers during hunting season. While this worked for them we decided we wanted to offer more freshly prepared food items to our customers. Being in the middle of the forest there was no other place to get hot food nearby. The closest place was at least 15 – 20 minutes away. We started out offering fresh hot food 2 days a week and sandwiches the other days. The hot food went over so well we upped it to fresh hot food 3 days a week. Our foot traffic increased, and we also started getting daily calls asking what was available for hot food take-out options that day. We decided to make things available 5 days a week. It wasn’t long until we added fresh hot food on the weekends too. As someone who has always loved to cook and experiment making up different recipes I felt comfortable developing recipes for the store menu. My daughter Cort had worked in the restaurant business for years. She came up with some recipes and great ideas for the store. She also has extensive bartending experience so she is knowledgeable about food and beverage pairings and has worked diligently to greatly expand our selections.  We upgraded our equipment over the next year and expanded our offerings. We used whatever locally produced ingredients we could source. We also started using a restaurant supply delivery vendor for things like food packaging supplies, and some of the ingredients we needed, There was definitely a learning curve for all of us as we tried to navigate the rapid changes that were required as our takeout business expanded. We learned that sometimes it just isn’t fiscally possible to make everything we wanted to make. It also might not be possible time wise, as we wear many hats as small business owners and are stretched pretty thin. As an example, my husband Ken makes the best smoked ribs you will ever taste, but it is incredibly time consuming and the raw food costs are quite high as we always use super high quality ingredients. We would love to offer the ribs a few times a month but with everything else we do it just isn’t possible time wise. Instead we have had to make the ribs an occasional offering on the menu. Through trial and error we have learned we can make some things all the time and some things on occasion. This was a hard concept to master as we always wanted to please our customers.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: instagram@meauwatakageneralstore
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MeauwatakaGeneralStore

Image Credits
Pam Sandy Cort Jenkins