Hidden Gems: Meet Jon Henry of Jon Henry General Store

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jon Henry.

Hi Jon, so excited to have you on the platform. So, before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today. 
Jon Henry General Store opened in 2018 in New Market’s oldest building: Abbie Henkel House of 1802. This limestone and brick building features a stone foundation and poured glass windows. A later occupant, Miss Abbie Henkel, was a talented pianist and taught music lessons for many years. In addition to being the home of one of the town’s founding families, the building has had several commercial uses, including as a general store operated by Abe Neff and Samuel Funkhouser around 1835. The store again serves as a community general store featuring an array of essential eats, gifts, and unique finds. 

My family has been living, harvesting, working, and farming in the Shenandoah Valley for over 6 generations. My family’s home place is north of the shop in Mt Jackson. The storefront provided us an avenue to directly sell from our farm like beef, pumpkins, sweet corn, and pumpkins. We opened fairly small at the store and have been growing steadily since 2018, with small renovations or additions every year. 

This past year, we had some of our largest growth with a new outdoor pavilion for summer produce sale and the addition of 6 EV car chargers, resurfacing the parking lot, and adding an AIRBNB onto the store. It’s been a nice steady growth that responds to our community’s needs. 

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Opening the store was a lot of work, especially because I never took a business class, even in my 8 years of higher education. I was able to tap into resources like the Small Business Development office and other economic development offices in the region to get our plan and such in order. 

COVID, of course, threw a major wrench in our plans and growth. We were deemed essential, so we were actually able to stay open. We originally were a general store that focused on gifts with a side of groceries, but COVID prompted us to switch into a store model that was solely about food with minimal gifts. We are gain brining back more gifts as the Pandemic and its effects subside. 

Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about Jon Henry General Store?
We’re one of the few stores in the entire Commonwealth of Virginia to participate in the Virginia Fresh Match Incentive Program. This nationally funded program through the USDA incentives folks to eat healthy by giving a 50% Discount on fresh produce purchases with an EBT, SNAP, or Food Stamps Card. As a store located in a rural food desert, this program has become very central to our work and mission in the community. 

As part of our work around food access, we also have partnered with Virginia Cooperative Extension and the Virginia Family Nutrition program to offer free classes on home budgeting, cooking 101, canning 101, food preservation, and personal health advice. These programs are typically all free and are quite popular in the summers with the arrival of local produce season. Our county recently launched a public bus program, SHENGO, and we’re now paying all our customers’ bus fares to and from the shop to ensure everyone has access to healthy fresh foods. 

Our store demand has outgrown what my family can produce, so we now work with an array of local growers to keep the shelves full. Most of our local farmers are actually Horse & Buggy Mennonites, so it can be an interesting conversion in our parking lot with Customers charging their Teslas and Horse Drawn wagons unloading produce. Throughout the year, we typically source from over 200 local families. 

Virginia is a unique state for agriculture because of its wide diversity. We can get fresh seafood like oysters from the Chesapeake Bay, all types of local meats from the Piedmont region, peanuts, and specialty crops in Southern Virginia, and all types of fruit from the Mountainous western part of the state. It’s been quite surprising to find so many source of local food to fit into most of our grocery categories. We can get local ice cream, plant-based meats, organic cheeses, seafood, and apricots, all from within the state. 

Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
I try to remain aware of trends, even for being within a rural community. We are slowly adding more technology to the store’s infrastructure so folks can shop from home, order curbside pickup, and preview products in AR or VR experiences. We can’t be just brick and mortar or online and working to figure out a manageable way for us to blend the two together. 

We are seeing an issue around food literacy developing, even in an agricultural area. I am not exactly sure the cause, but we are often running into issues on improper food handling and safety by consumers. Even more pressing, we are having folks lack basic cooking skills or interest. We are aggressively working with state partners to create public programs to ensure folks feel more comfortable cooking at home and trying out new meal ideas. 

In general, we are seeing a resurgence of interest in food preservation, like canning, but also dehydrating and freeze-drying. There is lot of information online about these practices, but we are working with State Partners to uplift the safer practices to our customers. I was pretty luck to have a grandma who told me what was safe to can and not can, but not everyone has that mentorship. 

Contact Info:

• Website: jonhenrygeneralstore.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonhenrygeneral
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JonHenryGeneralStore/