December 1, 2005

By Lauren Heaton

The owner of two Miami Valley health food stores plans to open a third shop in Yellow Springs on Dayton Street.

Bob Edwards, the proprietor of Springs Natural Foods in Springfield and Springboro, said this week that he is leasing the space on Dayton Street once occupied by Moody Shoes. He said he thinks that Yellow Springs can support its own health food store.

“Yellow Springs is one of those towns where a health food store seems to complement the town and the philosophy of the majority of people who live there,” he said. “Having talked with a lot of customers from Yellow Springs, I feel there is a large enough base of people who care about what they’re putting in their bodies to sustain a health food store.”

Edwards said he hopes to open Springs Natural sometime in January.

The store will carry “a full complement of health foods,” including refrigerated and frozen foods, some fresh produce, vitamins and herbs, bulk grains, nuts and dried fruits, as well as health and beauty products, he said.

Edwards said he does not expect to sell prepared foods because of what he called the prohibitive regulations and labor-intensive work it would involve, but he hopes to operate a juice bar during the summer.

The 1,200-square-foot space, which he is leasing from Dunphy Real Estate, accommodates the store’s needs fairly well, Edwards said, with plenty of parking for deliveries in the back and for customers on Dayton Street out front.

He said he plans to replace the carpet in the front of the store with tile and make some minor adjustments to install a six-door freezer and a four-to-five-door refrigerator.

Like the Organic Grocery that supplied the village with natural foods for over three decades before it closed last fall, Springs Natural will supply healthy, natural products. But unlike the O.G., Edwards said, his store will be highly visible on Dayton Street, and will have the buying power of a group of stores that one small store could never manage.

Ten years ago, when Edwards was working as a nuclear medicine technologist at Kettering Hospital and thinking about going into the health food business, he said he wasn’t sure he could sustain just a single store.

He had always shopped at health food stores and had an interest in natural foods, but it wasn’t until Tony Haas, the owner of Healthy Alternatives natural food stores in Dayton, offered to supply Edwards’s store from his warehouse that Edwards opened his first business in Springboro. Edwards called it Healthy Alternatives, and five years later, he opened a second store in Springfield.

But the Springboro store hasn’t grown much, Edwards said, and a third store in Yellow Springs would be right in between Springfield and his home in Oakwood, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Edwards said he plans to divide his time mainly between the stores in Springfield and Yellow Springs, where he will staff one full-time manager and three to four part-time employees to help him run the business.

Earlier this year, Edwards said, he decided his business was strong enough to shift away from using Healthy Alternatives as a supplier. He renamed both his stores Springs Natural Foods and now relies mostly on direct supply from his distributors, he said.

Edwards acknowledged that without Haas’s advice and buying power, he never would have learned the business or been able to survive. But now that Springs Natural is established, Edwards said, he’s confident that with the help of a knowledgeable, hard-working staff, he can serve the Yellow Springs community with foods that are better for them and better for the environment.

“We want to serve people who adhere to that philosophy,” he said. “I think there will be a fairly loyal group of people who will support the store, and we’ll support them by having a good selection and reasonable prices.”

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com