A Brief History of Marczyk Fine Foods
by Barbara Macfarlane
It all started when…
All last week I was bothered by something I was forgetting. Was it a birthday? An event? No, it was Marczyk Fine Foods’s Anniversary! I blame Covid…
So, for our new crew, and the wily veterans, here’s a Brief History of Marczyk Fine Foods.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
The idea to start a fine food market, a place where you could get great meat, local produce, fresh fish, and milk in glass bottles, was driven by Pete’s frustration over having to bounce all over town to get these things. He couldn’t be the only one, right?
With a dream and a vision for a Denver fresh market, we wrote a business plan that seemed realistic (but proved to be outrageously optimistic) and Pete pounded the pavement to raise money to build it. We wrapped the business plan in butcher paper like a piece of meat and dropped it off around town.
Our first location at 17th and Clarkson was a shuttered nightclub, with great bones and parking, on a busy street.
Construction started and then…9/11. Our world came to a frightening halt. The stock market crashed, and people who maybe had money to invest suddenly did not. Pete stopped construction and redoubled his fundraising efforts, with success. This was only the first of a few sobering events in our journey.
“Why would people wait in line to get into a grocery store?”
On a beautiful spring day in late April 2002 — much like the day I write this — we opened Marczyk’s with a line out the door. The work to get the store open was herculean with a team of Pete, me and our original GM — but little did we know that our work hadn’t really even started yet. There was great press coverage of our opening parties, our concept, and our products. Things were looking good!
Then reality hit us fast and hard: “Too expensive! $12 Olive Oil? No cubed cheese or prepared sandwiches, are you guys crazy? This neighborhood can never support a gourmet fancy food-snob store like yours! You guys are pretty proud of your pork…”. Because, you see, in 2002 no one knew where their food came from, and no one cared. “All-natural” meant after the pork was processed, not what it went through during its life. No one knew what a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) was. And we were completely unrealistic about how customers would use us!
No one was coming in, except to make a fancy weekend meal. We had an infant son at home and we were putting in 80-90 hour weeks — never mind the fact we were hemorrhaging money. Pete would stand on 17th and wave fresh corn at people driving by, or hold up “Nice melons!” signs. We catered, took cheese to farmers’ markets, we had pumpkin patches. Please Denver, come give us a try!
Luckily, Rob Jones had joined us as support for our accountant, and after our accountant called me sobbing with the news she wasn’t coming back, Rob quietly took over and redid the entire accounting system. Ok, there was one fix.
Things were desperate for 3 years, as we frantically redid the entire store: added a deli (the Parisian is OG); cubed and wrapped the damn cheese if that’s what people wanted; opened Marczyk Fine Wines; and we just kept showing up. As did our crew: cooks, cashiers, butchers, deli workers, and produce folks all had faith that we would make it.
“A path is made by walking on it.”
Luckily, Mr. Reality Party, Paul Marczyk, showed up, and summarily dismantled many of the things Pete and I were convinced made Marczyk’s special. No more catering, no more indoor seating or daily specials (Frank was in the back cooking with two hotplates and an oven, no hood, it looked like a NYC tenement kitchen.)
My favorite Paul declaration was: “We’re going to stop making everything except lasagna. When we can keep lasagna in the case for two weeks, then we’ll add something else.” And so we did, successfully building our prep foods department.
We invented Burger Night, just as a way for people to try our Niman Ranch meats — a grill, Pete flipping burgers, a delicious bun, and all the fixin’s put us on the neighborhood map.
Things got better day by day. Our customer database was growing, and I clumsily pushed out 1000 weekly emails, text only, to our customers through Outlook, 70 at a time. The world was changing, with customers starting to want to know where their food came from. Restaurants were calling out local ingredients on their menus, and “local” took on real meaning. Slowly our customer base increased.
The press continued to be enthusiastic. Passionate people continued to apply to work here. But the most important part: we never changed our vision of being A World Class Neighborhood Market. We have always carried Niman Ranch beef, pork and lamb, and have deepened our relationship with them by raising tons of money for their Next Generation Scholarship Fund. https://www.nimanranchfoundation.org/
We continue to source really fine foods, and thanks to the MCC — thank you MCC! — we create amazing breads, prepared foods, and sweets.
Fast forward to recent times.
Covid tried to take our world down, but we would not let it. You all kept showing up. You kept each other safe and smiled through your masks at our customers who have said — in person, on Facebook, Google, and Yelp — how thankful they are to all of you.
The news these days is full of changes in our grocery world. Amazon buys Whole Foods, meal kits in the mail, Instacart so customers don’t have to actually go out for groceries. But we believe that brick and mortar stores like ours will continue to thrive…and we hope you believe that too.
Because sometimes one doesn’t know what’s for dinner, and they’re at the end of a long day, and all it takes is one of you to greet them, or Emilio to holler “Hello Mr. So and So!” and ask the all-important question: “What’s for dinner?” It’s a lifeline we all need.
We get emails like this all the time:
“Thanks to Marczyk’s for making me feel like a boss home cook, pretty sure I just ate the best damn dinner in town tonight, made even better by knowing the good people that got it to my kitchen.”
And here is why I tell you this story. Nineteen years and counting, we can’t forget what we came for: to enrich people’s lives through food. Good, simple, delicious, carefully sourced, enthusiastically displayed food.
Marczyk’s — our two little stores — has changed how people shop, and how they think about food. We continue to define fine food in Denver. We were, and are, part of the “where does my food come from” revolution, and it’s something we are extremely proud of. Thank you for being part of our business, thank you for showing up all these months and years.
Looking forward, there are plans for a 3rd store even though Happy Canyon fell through. We hope you’ll stick around for the ride!
Things you might not know about our 19 year history:
The building on 17th was a drag queen venue, and the basement was full of sparkly dresses and size 12 high heels. I’m sorry we gave away the disco ball…
The building on Colfax was a Safeway in the thirties. You’ll see the same building as ours — brick courses running up the sides, big front windows, barrel roof — all over town. The original Safeway floors — quarter-sawn oak — were hidden under years of linoleum. You can see them in Fairfax Wine & Spirits!
A car in our Colfax store: https://denver.cbslocal.com/2015/11/03/car-crashes-into-marczyks-fine-foods/. (If this won’t open, google “car drives into Marczyk’s on Colfax.”)
Great Ingredients. https://video.rmpbs.org/show/great-ingredients/
We are one of the top 5 donors IN THE COUNTRY to the Next Generation Fund for Niman Ranch. Read Chef Jamey Fader’s reflections about his visit to a Niman farm.
We had a vegetable garden across the street from 17th Ave behind the salon, and Elaine Granada would walk over her delivery to us! Talk about local.
“I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”
Thanks for reading.
Barbara, Pete, Paul, and Rob