Meet the ‘unexpected’ grocer

Nancy Deering Sands had never expected to run Tom’s Food Markets, the small grocery chain founded by her grandparents Tom and Eva Deering in 1946, but after her father Dan and older sister Christy Deering Kuhnke died within a year of each other, Deering Sands moved from Philadelphia back to her hometown of Traverse City, Mich., to manage the five Tom’s stores. Three weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

“No one knew how to run a business through COVID, let alone a grocery business where groceries were going out faster than you could bring them in,” said Deering Sands. “The team said we would figure it out together. And that’s what we did.”

Dan Deering had left the store with a strong foundation. Before he died, he’d consolidated the chain from seven stores to five. He’d been a firm believer in regular cleaning and sanitation and wide aisles, which made the adjustment to social distancing regulations easier.

Located at the very top of Michigan’s lower peninsula, Traverse City is a popular destination for vacationers from Chicago and Detroit. The pandemic, of course, slowed the number of visitors considerably. Deering Sands and her husband Ed Sands decided to use the lull to update Tom’s. This included not just remodeling the stores, improving the infrastructure, and changing the employee dress code, but also updating the employee benefits and payroll systems and adding modern conveniences like self-checkout and curbside pickup.

“There’s a lot of traffic in Traverse City in the summer,” said Sands. “It’s a small town with a limited number of highways. People want convenience, a quick in and out.

But with that convenience they try to provide old-fashioned personalized service: For example, if an item from a curbside service order is sold out, someone from the store will call or text the customer personally about a substitution. Deering Sands also arranged a partnership with a local company called Stocked that fills pantries and refrigerators in rental houses with groceries in advance so vacationers don’t have to spend time food shopping.

By the time social distancing ended and the tourists came back, Tom’s was ready.

“The investments we made were significant,” said Sands, “but the payback was quick. We’re glad we did it before the supply chain went crazy, before changes made the ROI a lot steeper.”

That doesn’t mean the changes have come to an end. Tom’s has always had a close relationship with nearby farmers — Tom and Eva Deering were farmers themselves before they opened the store with a windfall from an exceptional cherry harvest — but now they’ve been working with other businesses in the area. 

Their “Local Choice” initiative highlights products from more than two dozen companies in Northern Michigan, including Huckster, a bourbon barrel-aged brown ale from Shorts Brewing and Iron Fish Distillery, named for Tom Deering’s old delivery wagon. (Bourbon and beer also happened to be two of Dan Deering’s favorite things.)

Looking back, taking risks was worth it.

“It was a scary time for me, new as I was to the business, to take on all these remodels,” she says, “but now that I look back, I’m so glad we did it.”

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This feature is part of our 2024 “SN Independent Superstars” list: see more superstars here.