The Richmond Annex, a neighborhood nestled on the city’s south end near Albany and El Cerrito, is celebrating its 100th anniversary this weekend with a block party.
The subdivision was annexed by Richmond on Sept. 7, 1926 by a 92–88 vote in favor of becoming part of Richmond over El Cerrito.
Bob Gerner, a lifelong Annex resident and an El Cerrito High graduate, is one of the neighborhood’s more well-known faces. He founded The Natural Grocery Company, an employee-owned business with three storefronts in the East Bay, and he’ll be speaking at the centennial event Saturday at 1 p.m.
Richmond Annex centennial block party
What: 100th anniversary block party
When: 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Where: Huntington Avenue
Details: Live music, local artists, food and dessert, a bouncy house, scavenger hunt and book swap. Natural Grocery owner Bob Gerner will speak around 1 p.m.
Gerner started with Westbrae Natural Foods on Gilman Street in Berkeley in 1971, which eventually became the Berkeley Natural Grocery Company. The El Cerrito Natural Grocery followed in 1988, and it’s actually on San Pablo Avenue in Richmond despite its name. And in 2013, he added the Prepared Food Annex next door, a cafe and juice bar serving sandwiches, ice cream, pizza, wine, cheese, coffee and more.
Along the way, Gerner became a leader in the non genetically modified food (GMO) movement, pushing for food labeling standards, and he’s known to be the first to sell tofu burgers in the United States. Richmondside sat down with Gerner outside his El Cerrito store to talk about his life in Richmond (you can read more about his life in this article) and his journey into natural foods.
Q. You’ve spent your life in the East Bay, and on Saturday you’ll be speaking at the Richmond Annex Block Party in front of the house where you grew up, celebrating 100 years of the neighborhood. What is it about this place that has kept you coming back?
It’s home. You know? I mean, my parents started shopping in the (El Nido supermarket, now El Cerrito Natural Grocery) store in 1931. I was born in ’46. I was raised in the store. They already had relationships, and my brothers worked at the meat counter, cleaning up in high school. And, I had my first banana split next door, where the Annex is. It was called Mario Drugs, and it had a soda fountain, and we’d go down for lunch once every month or two, when we went shopping to Oakland. But I had my first banana split there, and it was .25 or .35, I don’t remember. And, you know, it was just a local place, and I grew up in both those stores, going there all the time. I mean, the grocery store expanded, and they hired some new employees, and I know when I came back from college, we still referred to them as the new guys. So, everyone else had been there all my life.
Q. Richmond Annex resident David Evans wrote about your childhood in the Annex and your journey into the natural foods movement. When you were a student at UC Davis what exactly helped propel your so-called ‘conversion?’
So going to Sacramento and visiting these people, we stopped in at a place called Sacramento Real Foods. And I picked up their literature and, basically overnight, I got into organic. I didn’t know my grandfather was into it in the ‘30s, because he died before I was born. So after I opened the natural foods store, my uncles came in and said, ‘Oh, Pop used to feed us this stuff.’ So I found out he used to shop at the Food Mill in Oakland, it’s still there, although not as glorious as it once was. And, my dad used to make mainly pumpernickel bread, which I thought was terrible. I thought he was crazy. But when I read all this stuff, it all made sense to me and I got into organic foods.
We visited there probably twice a week. I picked up some literature and got turned onto that and decided to open a store. I had no money, and the baker that I had at the coffee house, she was interested in natural foods and organic foods, too. And so we decided to be partners, and neither of us had money, but then we met four other couples that were interested, so we got together with 10 people all together, and we each put in a few hundred dollars here, a few hundred dollars there, what we could spare or scrape up. I borrowed from my girlfriend who lived in Santa Cruz. And I think they made me the first manager, ‘cause I was the only one with managerial experience. And then I realized I didn’t want to be one of 10 partners…and we were working for free. We didn’t get paid. And so I left soon after and opened the store in Berkeley.
Q. Did you see yourself as a pioneer at the time that you opened Westbrae Natural Foods? Was there a community around you who was interested in natural foods and healthy eating, or was the store the first of its kind?
No. There was Wholly Foods on Shattuck and Ashby, Good Natured Foods on Solano and Peralta. They were short-lived. After we opened, Good Natured closed down. Those were the first three stores I sold to, Wholly Foods, Good Natured Foods and Ma Revolution. And the Food Mill was the fourth, and then this macrobiotic store was the fifth. And so I would just go in and bring… mayonnaise and mustard used to come in five gallon plastic tubs, and so I would get all of these ones, and put a liner in it, and then put granola and deliver in that so I didn’t have to buy boxes. I got all my things for free. And then after we opened the store, it was called Westbrae granola. But it’s long gone. Um, it was not very good, frankly. I wouldn’t touch it now with a 10-foot pole.
Q. Over the years, you have been quite the innovator —helping found the Non-GMO Project, converting your business into an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), and opening three storefronts in the East Bay, the most recent being The Annex on San Pablo Avenue. Where does this business savvy come from? Did you have any entrepreneurial background before opening your first store?
My parents bought a bar in 1959 (John and Di’s Albany Inn), and I learned everything you shouldn’t do about running a business. For 10 years, they never made any money in a year. I bartended for a while before they sold it. I worked as a janitor cleaning up for years , and I worked as a bartender, and then after they sold it, I worked for the new guy as a janitor for a while. And, I think I started learning about business from my first job in college. I worked at a place called the Fryer House, like Kentucky fried chicken except it was good… it was actually better. So I worked there on and off for two years, and I became assistant manager. I went from 135 to 199 pounds in six months ‘cause you could eat all the food you wanted. The year before, I had not worked, and I stopped accepting money from my uncle who helped me my first year because I found out it was a loan not a gift and I wasn’t studying seriously enough to warrant that. Living in Richmond, I was rather behind and awkward, very shy. I couldn’t talk to people, couldn’t speak in front of people. It was my chance to become socialized.
I ended up managing the coffee house on campus, the student-owned coffee house. It was about to close down when I applied, and then we turned it around. Since my dad was a butcher, and I’d worked at two meat packing plants, I knew the business somewhat. We selected good, quality meats, we did tours of Sacramento and we sourced good stuff and we made our own sandwiches and they were really good. And they were actually no more expensive than they used to be, and we started making money. We were so successful at one time I was booking music for every night of the week. I dropped out of school for one semester just to concentrate on that, ‘cause we went from eight employees to 55, and it just expanded the hours and expanded what we were doing and it just took a lot of time. Then when I came back, I took some courses. I had three courses to complete, and I opened a store in Davis instead.
Q. The Non-GMO Project was started in 2006 as a collaboration between The Natural Grocery Company and The Big Carrot Natural Food Market, which is in Toronto. Can you tell me more about how this project came to be?
We had a customer in the Berkeley store who asked the question, and I think I was in the store at the time, and they wanted to know if the soy lecithin was genetically modified (GMO). And I said, ‘You know, we really don’t know, but it probably is.’ And she said, ‘Why? (expletive), why are you carrying it?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, what can we do?’ It was just, 10 years ago, it wasn’t around and then all of the sudden, you know, 85% of the soybeans grown were genetically modified so that they just co-mingling, so you couldn’t buy anything and know. And so that one question, what can we do, started me thinking.
And so we organized with three employees in the Berkeley store, and we tasked them with going through every product in the store, looking at the ingredients, and we had a list of ingredients that were at risk for being GMO, and we’ve listed all the products that have those in them. And then we wrote a letter to the manufacturers of those products, asking, What are they doing about chemicals now? Are they aware of them? Are they concerned? What are they going to do in the future? And once we did that, we sent the letter to all the other stores of the United States and asked other stores to sign on. We got 161 stores that signed on, and then we sent it out to the manufacturers. And all we were trying to do was provide information for our customers about what these brands were doing.
And then I got a phone call from a genetic testing company, and she said I read about your thing, your organization should do a standard and start testing products. And I said, ‘what organization, we don’t have an organization. I just sent a letter out and had 161 stores sign on.’ And she said, ‘that’s enough.’ I didn’t think anything could happen but I referred her to one of the guys that did the canvassing of the store, and it went further and then she said there was another company in Canada that had done a lot of work on GMOs, and were the only ones in the United States that had done it, and she thought we should pursue this, and so we talked and we ended up putting $5,000 toward writing a standard for her company. And Big Carrot put up $5,000 toward writing a standard.
Before this happened in our store, I read the book ‘Seeds of Deception’ by Jeffrey Smith, so I was introduced to GMOs by that. Actually, my first memory of being concerned about it was, are you familiar with Bill Shirtliff and the ‘Book of Tofu’? He wrote the ‘Book of Tofu’ in 1975. And he also wrote the book of ‘Miso and Tempeh’ and a lot of food things. So he’s very concerned about soy being contaminated with GMOs and he gave me a call and said, what are you gonna do about this? I’m going, What can I do? I’m not going to do anything. Anyway, so that was my first time becoming aware of that. That was probably 1999.
And so basically that customer question. I felt it would be more successful if we brought in manufacturers and farmers and all aspects of the industry. I remember, in our first board meetings, the standard that we had written was terrible. It was not understandable by a layman. And if we couldn’t understand it, we felt it wouldn’t be successful. So we commissioned the company to rewrite it. And so we weren’t ready till 2007. Now it’s, what, 100,000 products are covered by the non-GMO project label.
Q. Why do you think it matters that consumers know if the foods they are eating have been genetically modified?
Well, for the same reason I got into organic forms. I feel that if you’re eating something that’s pure and natural, it’s probably better for you. Reading his book, I accepted that there are unintended consequences of genetically modifying, and, you have novel proteins that the body doesn’t recognize and stuff like that. And that, unless it was tested a lot more, that was something that was, you know, not good. I mean, we have a lot more problems with different types of illnesses now, are those from people ingesting GMOs? I don’t know. So, just… I guess I work from the premise that older varieties of natural foods are better.
Q. In 2002, your business became employee-owned. Why did you implement an ESOP? How has it changed the business model and the culture?
Because I got a divorce. I started the divorce in 2000, and it was final, December 15, 2002. I sold the company to the employees December 30, 2002. We came to the decision that it would be better if we split, and so I bought her out of the business, and I sold to the employees.
My wife, one of the things we did, we wanted to have retention, and we’ve been somewhat successful. We have had five people over 40 years now that work here. And, in fact, Cindy, who’s next door, she just celebrated her 40th August 27th. She worked here for 16 years, then we became employee-owned. And her sister was the first 40-year employee. We hired her… July 20th, 1982. And then we have the manager in the El Cerrito store who has been with us 40 years. And Emma, who just retired this last December, worked 40 years and seven months. Yeah, and we have quite a few over 30 years.
Part of it was the way we designed it. We took every employee out to lunch on their anniversary at the restaurant of their choice. And for the 10-year anniversary, well, you got a free trip to Hawaii for two. And on your 20th anniversary, you got a free trip to Europe. 1st class if we do it. And on the 15th anniversary, we gave a cash bonus, I believe. And so, yeah, that did a lot with keeping people, and then we’d have holiday parties, and, you know, now, of course, we were a small store. We opened in Berkeley with, you know, 13 employees. So, um, you can do that. But now with having 140, it’s really hard to do that. So instead of a lunch every year, there’s four employee appreciation meals served by the management in each location. So they’ve done that instead. And there’s no more trips. And, um, You know, I, you know, I hope, hopefully there’s some employees that will stay around. But yeah, I count that as one of our successes.
Q. Famously, you were the first person in the country to develop and serve a tofu burger. Would you consider this a defining accomplishment?
Yeah. I mean it was pretty good. It’s weird. I thought, you know, with the success we had at our location, it would catch on. But it never did.
Q. Why do you believe businesses like El Cerrito Natural Foods are important to have here in Richmond?
I think it provides a space for people. And they can come to talk. I mean, we don’t have wifi for customers in the Annex. People talk, and we have music one night a week. It’s nice that people can know the people that they shop with. And I think it’s important, I mean, too many people spend too much time on their phones, and, there’s less… People aren’t socialized like they used to be. But coming to a place that’s just, you know, you can talk to people, you can establish relationships, and, one of the things I’m proud of is we bring employees from other countries and work here, go through a program called MESA, multinational exchange for sustainable agriculture. We started that in 2010, and we’ve had 28 stewards from around the world. And it gives our customers a chance to be friends with people that see things entirely different.
