Can you imagine starting with an eight foot table in Vancouver’s Granville Island market and building a produce company with 27 stores and more than $60 million in annual sales?
That’s what brothers Kin Wah and Kin Hun Leung have done in just 17 years. The most amazing thing about Kin’s Farm Market, owned and operated by the Leungs and Kin Wah’s wife, Queenie Chu, is that its success is based on one simple idea.
“Back when they were at Granville Island, my husband and Kin Hun looked around at all these other vendors they were competing against and asked themselves, ‘how can we be different?’ ” Chu says.
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“When they decided they had to have the freshest product, they decided the way to get that was to go right to the grower,” she says.
So they drove out to the Fraser Valley and dropped in on farmers.
“They didn’t go to big farmers because they only had one table. They would go to smaller farms and tell the grower what they were looking for.”
They would drive up in their van seeking to buy a couple of cases of this and a few dozen pints of that. They were just out of high school and, having only arrived from China in 1981, still struggling with English.
Every day, the Leungs would close their stand at 6:30 or 7 p.m. and drive to the farms to collect produce to sell the next day. If traffic was light, they could make the trip in 90 minutes, load their van, and drive home, where the produce would be stored in a cooler in their garage.
If all went well, everything would be unloaded by 11:30 or midnight. By 8 a.m. they would be at their stand, proudly proclaiming the freshness of their fruit and vegetables.
“They did this seven days a week,” Chu says.
Eventually, the brothers opened a second stand and then, in 1987, their first store. More stores followed, but the focus remained unchanged.
“We keep our coolers in our stores very small, only about 200 sq. feet,” she says. “Our business is not to store produce, but to sell it.”
You see that philosophy in products such as Kin’s “jet fresh” pineapple, flown in and on the shelves three days after they are picked in Maui.
“If you send them by ship, you’re looking at 14 days before you can have them on the shelf,” Chu says.
“Many stores sell pineapples for $1.99 but we sell ours for $1.99 a pound, or about $10 for a pineapple. People are surprised by our price until they taste our pineapples.”
Chu came up with the company’s motto: we sell freshness.
“It’s not just something we say to our customers, but something that our employees have to know: if you’re going to sell fresh produce, then it better be fresh,” she says.
It’s such a simple concept that it’s easy to miss its power until you think of that eight-foot-long table in Granville Island and what it inspired.
Glen Cheater is editor of the Canadian Farm Manager, the newsletter of the Canadian Farm Business Management Council.
