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Wild Oats founder Gilliland bringing concept to Boulder
FORT COLLINS - When he was head of the health-food grocery Wild Oats, Mike Gilliland would show up at stores dressed in an apron and ready to work. He would stock produce, move dairy crates - whatever it took to help his employees.
"He'd work alongside us and ask a lot of questions," said Peter Waldmann, who started as a dairy clerk at a Wild Oats in Santa Fe, N.M., and moved his way up to store manager. "People have always been really important to Mike. He's always led with his heart."
Gilliland is now chief executive officer of Sunflower Farmers Market, a new kind of health-food store started in 2002 after Gilliland left Wild Oats, a company he started in Boulder in the late 1980s. Sunflower recently announced it would open its first Boulder store. The 25,000-square-foot store will be in The Village shopping center replacing the United Artists movie theater and a few other storefronts on the west side of the McGuckin Hardware complex.
Sunflower was founded in Longmont, although the administrative offices recently moved to Boulder. In four years, Sunflower has grown to 11 stores in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada. The Colorado stores include one in Fort Collins and one in Denver. Two more stores in the Denver area, the one in Boulder and one in Albuquerque are scheduled to open in 2007.
Gilliland calls Sunflower a cross between a traditional farmers market and Trader Joe's, a specialty food store with locations in 22 states.
"It took a few years of experimentation for us to figure out exactly what was going to work," Gilliland said. "Now that we've figured out our niche, we're starting to grow the company."
Sunflower is also competitive with Wild Oats, Whole Foods, conventional supermarkets such as Safeway and King Soopers - even Wal-Mart.
Newspaper advertisements and in-store promotions for Sunflower boast, "Serious food, silly prices," and "Better-than-supermarketquality at better-than-supermarket prices."
The store looks and feels nothing like Whole Foods or Wild Oats. There are no expensive fixtures, no full-scale salad bars, no in-store cafés.
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