Our grocery-bag partnership with Catholic Charities’ Sewing Training Academy, empowering area refugees with job skills
A local charity has helped refugees around Nashville learn to sew in hopes of contributing to the city’s manufacturing industry.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – A local charity has helped refugees around Nashville learn to sew in hopes of contributing to the city’s manufacturing industry.
Catholic Charities Sewing Academy has worked to build skilled sewers for today’s manufacturing industry.
In the meantime, students used their skills to make canvas bags for the Turnip Truck in Nashville. The men and women come from all over the world.
“So most of the students in the class at this point are refugees.We’vestudents from 10 different countries. A lot of the students lately have been from Nepal, Burma, Somolia, Syria, Iraq,” said Trishawna Quincy.
You can buy the limited edition bags at the Turnip Truck for $19.99.
Troy “Fraz” Frassrand (left) and Christi Frassrand of the competition barbecue team Chokin ‘N’ tha Smoke.Since Turnip Truck launched its splashy new store in East Nashville earlier this year, a lot of the attention has been on the locally owned natural market’s East Side operation. But Turnip Truck also has a prominent location in the Gulch, and this weekend it aims to show the love to its many customers there — by throwing a big customer appreciation party at Turnip Truck Urban Fare, located at 321 12th Ave. S.
The event is 2 to 6 p.m. this Saturday, July 16, and there will be a plethora of free samples on offer at the store, including items from Albert’s Organics, Boar’s Head, Bongo Java, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, Real Water and Yazoo Brewing Company.
The party will also host a competition barbecue truck, Chokin “N” tha Smoke (out of Fayetteville, Tenn.), which will be serving up fresh barbecue chicken and ribs, smoked on-site, for customers to purchase. Live bluegrass music will add to the festive mood.
The wine in grocery stores law took effect Friday, and hundreds of retailers across the state started selling wine at 8 a.m. It’s a landmark shift in Tennessee’s alcohol laws that potentially has widespread impact on businesses and consumers.
See coverage from earlier today:
3:46 p.m.: Turnip Truck, East Nashville:
“Today’s the day,” one customer said while walking into the Turnip Truck in East Nashville.
Since Tennessee passed the new law allowing grocery stores to carry wine, the Turnip Truck has been planning for today.
On aisle 2, the shelves are stocked with some of the best organic wines a reasonable amount of money can buy, from bottles of Italian and French to cold cans of Oregonian Underwood.
The natural food store sold its first two bottles of red wine just after 8 a.m.
Within reach, customers can also pick up some fine cheese, cured meats, nuts or chocolate. At the start of the aisle, the Woodland Street grocery store has stocked wine tumblers, champagne flutes and bottle openers.
“If you’re headed to a party or just trying to pull together your evening, it’s one-stop shopping,” Turnip Truck chief operating officer Kim Totzke said.
Totzke, a former chef who has lived in the East Nashville neighborhood for 21 years, said the grocery store’s ability to sell wine is about convenience, not getting new customers. She handled the wine buying process from start to finish.
Totzke’s favorites? The Klinker Brick Old Vine Zinfandel and the Love Drunk Rosé. To try the Klinker, shoppers will have to check back another day because it already sold out this afternoon, along with two other brands.
“It’s definitely important to make sure everyone understands that your wine store is still there for that experience with the larger selection and the customer service of a full complete wine store,” Totzke said. She lauded nearby Woodland Wine Merchant for their quality of service.
One customer asked not to be photographed near the wine. He said his good friend owns a wine store but was on his way out with bottles of pinot noir and champagne.
“I will still shop at my favorite wine shop down the street, but I think it’s awesome,” Shawna Lee, 53, said. She was buying a bottle of organic Art of Earth Montepulciano D’Abruzzo. “A lot of states have this down, so it’s good Tennessee does now.”
While Dan + Shay spend most of their time on the road these days, when they do have some time off they can be found grabbing a bite at a few of their favorite local spots and catching up with friends, whether it’s at their record label offices or down on Broadway.
Here are Dan + Shay’s Nashville Favorites…
The Turnip Truck: “Turnip Truck definitely. Great organic food. Healthy food. It’s a cool place to hang out. They have great prepared food, hot bar, cold bar, soups.”
321 12th Ave S / theturniptruck.com
Robert’s Western World: “Robert’s Western World is our favorite bar. It’s one of the traditional honky tonks down on Broadway. There’s a magic to the music that’s being played there. There’s cheap drinks, they have grilled cheese, fried bologna sandwiches. It’s a whole experience.”
416 Broadway / robertswesternworld.com
Warner Music Nashville: “We love hanging out at our record label, our publishing company Warner Music Nashville. We signed here. It’s all of our friends. We love everybody here. It’s good people. They’re so supportive and they believed in our art. Any chance we get we’re roaming the halls, stealing people’s snacks, drinking coffee. We spend most of our time here.”
20 Music Square E / warnermusicnashville.com
Ocean Way Studios: “We like cutting our records there. We cut our new record there. We’re studio nerds. Even if we don’t have anything to record we go in there. It’s cool, inspiring vibes.”
1200 17th Ave S / oceanwaynashville.com
Chris DeStefano’s Condo: “We love that guy. Talk about a nerd in the best way. We’re all nerds. We love Star Wars and The X-Files. He is the greatest nerd ever. He’s got so many hit songs [so] he’s got some money in the bank for sure. He has all this memorabilia; the Back to the Future Casio watch, from the movie Alien he has the gun. He has toys to play with. We wrote ‘Nothin’ Like You’ there.”
I’ve been in East Nashville 27 years, but I grew up on a farm, and we always raised a garden. By the time I graduated college and moved here, I was really missing some of the food I grew up with. I found out about Sunshine Grocery on Belmont and just loved what they were doing, and I kept running into neighbors of mine from the East Side. I started on a quest to figure out how I could put a store like that in East Nashville, not knowing the first thing about the natural food industry. I was in medical sales before I started the store. I spent four or five years just going to all the natural food expos, talking to anybody and everybody in the industry. I heard about building relationships with local farmers, and it inspired me. I came home wanting to reach out to local farmers, local vendors, get more local things going, and be local ourselves.”
John Dyke’s primary mission — to educate his community on the existence and appreciation of fresh real food — comes to life on the first step inside The Turnip Truck’s new location. You’re instantly in the produce section, a wild party of fruits and vegetables that just look different. All organic, all local, no two tomatoes look exactly alike, as their genetically modified cousins do marching in lockstep at Walmart’s herbaceous Triumph of the Will motif. The Turnip Truck’s greens are varied and often large, the myriad bell pepper colors are deeper, and one would be forgiven for wanting to snatch a shiny big strawberry and blithely chomp it while passing through to the juice bar.
The Turnip Truck, from its inception in 2001 in 5 Points to its brand-new and muchly expanded digs a few blocks away at 701 Woodland, is a magnet and hub for people who care that you are what you eat. A lanky, 50-something gent, with whitish hair and beard, Dyke could be Hemingway’s genial younger brother. We sit in his new office (still under construction, as is a good bit of the second floor) with a floor-to-ceiling window view of East Park just across Woodland from the store. The sunlight streams in, a vista metaphoric for what he wants to do: engage the community. When the second floor is finished — downstairs already is — there will be tables, and the space set up for meetings, classes, and other endeavors local groups may need a gathering
place for.
“The design of this new store, with the mezzanine on the second floor especially, is to show the customer as the heart of the store,” Dyke says. “This is East Nashville’s store, and I want the community to tell me what they want
from us.”
He is clearly excited about the expansion. “Our produce department is four or five times the size of what it was in the old store,” he says. “We’ve added more and more to the juice bar, we have kambucha on tap, beer on tap, a deli, we’re putting in a fresh salad bar, a hot food bar, and a bakery. We have a full-service meat and seafood department now, which we didn’t have before, grass-fed beef from just up the road in Kentucky.
“Between the farms we work with, and the vendors for soaps, honey, health and beauty aids, candles, and other things, we’re working with about 80 different vendors now,” Dyke says. (And lest it be forgotten, there is a second Turnip Truck on the west side of the river in The Gulch for the convenience of the Westies.)
“With the two stores, we now have roughly 120 employees, so it feels good to be a source of employment for the community,” he says. Down the road, Dyke envisions an aquaponics greenhouse on the roof of the new location, and reaching out to the community children with an education program about real food and why it matters.
So what does John Dyke do for fun? More of his passion, actually. “I just bought a little farm outside of town,” he offers. “I’m looking at putting in an organic orchard with apples, peaches, pears, plums, figs, and apricots, looking at cultivating heirloom fruits, keeping those seeds growing for new generations.”
Dyke’s own entrepreneurial seed found good purchase on the East Side. “It’s a great neighborhood to be in. I’ve lived here now longer than I lived in my childhood home. This is home. I love it.”
Inside the newest iteration of The Turnip Truck in East Nashville, it’s easy to be enthralled by the expansive space, the walls of glass, the wide aisles, the brilliant displays of produce, and the second-floor bridge overhead. Founder John Dyke feels that too, but he is also proud to trace that growth to the store’s humble beginnings.
The son of a Greeneville, Tennessee, farmer who grew up eating fresh-as-it-gets foods, Dyke was instilled with a love of farm life and the good things it produced. He knew what a tomato should taste like. Bringing that goodness to the marketplace was sparked at a beloved and bygone store, Sunshine Grocery, after Dyke moved into East Nashville’s Edgefield neighborhood in 1990.
“I had allergies and found the local bee pollen I needed on the other side of town at Sunshine,” Dyke recalls. “But I found more. They had all-natural foods, organic produce—some of it locally grown—bulk spices, even great deli sandwiches. It also had a real spirit of community. Staff and customers engaged. People I knew from my neighborhood shopping there. And I thought, We need a place like this in East Nashville.”
It took time, research, and diligence for Dyke to learn the basics of the business and get the right location. In May 2001, he opened The Turnip Truck at 10th and Woodland in a building that went up a century earlier as an H.G. Hill grocery store. It felt right to return it to its original purpose, he says. Using Sunshine Grocery as his model, he sold whole foods—and as much local as possible.
“In the early days, we faced many challenges,” Dyke says. “I came to this understanding: This is a neighborhood store. I own it, but it’s my customers to shape. I’ll listen. Give me feedback.”
And the community did, embracing The Turnip Truck straightaway. That helped him align with the best supplement companies, ones with standardized testing, training, and education.
“We had outgrown the building by the time we opened our [second] store in The Gulch,” Dyke admits.
But that gave his team time to hone new aspects of the business just introduced there—like hot food service, a deli, and a juice bar—and to plan the new store in East Nashville. Just blocks from the original location, the flagship now boasts more than 12,000 square feet, offering full-service meat and seafood departments, a bakery and deli, beer and kombucha on tap, a hot and cold bar, and bountiful displays of fruits and vegetables that greet you as you enter. The second-floor bridge overlooks it all.
“The community is the heart of our store,” Dyke says. “We wanted to provide a café space where our customers can go to eat, read, relax.” The Turnip Truck will soon host cooking demonstrations and classes. Other future plans include aquaponics, rooftop gardens, and a greenhouse.
“Food that travels zero miles—think how amazing that will be,” Dyke says.
