The power of a crystal-clear vision
By Glenn Cheater
March 01, 2010
Can you imagine doing this – starting with a single eight-foot-table in Vancouver’s Granville Island market and building a produce company with 27 stores and more than $60 million in annual sales?
That’s what brothers Kin Wah and Kin Hun Leung have done in just 17 years.
But the most amazing thing about Kin’s Farm Market – owned and operated by the Leungs and Kin Wah’s wife Queenie Chu – is that its success is based on a single, deceptively simple idea.
“Back when they were at Granville Island, my husband and Kin Hun looked around at all these other vendors they were competing against and asked themselves, ‘How can we be different?’” recalls Queenie Chu.
“They decided they had to have the freshest product.”
That’s it. Of course, there’s more to the story but it’s all about their single-minded determination to hold true to that idea.
“When they decided they had to have the freshest product, they decided the way to get that was to go right to the grower,” says Chu. “So what they did was drive out to Surrey, Abbotsford and other places in the Fraser Valley and drop in on farmers. They didn’t go to big farmers because they only had one table. They would go to smaller farms and tell the grower what they were looking for.”
Those first suppliers no doubt weren’t expecting a lot of sales from the brothers who drove up in their van seeking to buy a couple of cases of this and a few dozen pints of that. After all, they were a couple of kids just out of high school and, having only arrived from Guangzhou, China in December 1981, still struggling with English.
But they sure would have been impressed by their work ethic.
Every day the Leungs would close their stand at 6:30 or 7 in the evening and drive out to the farms to get produce to sell the next day. If traffic was light, they could make the trip in 90 minutes, load up their van, and then drive home, where the produce would be stored in a cooler they had erected in their garage. Supper was fast-food takeout and if all went well, everything would be unloaded by 11:30 or midnight. By 8 the next morning, they would be at their stand, proudly proclaiming the freshness of their fruits and vegetables.
“They did this seven days a week,” says Chu. “But this is how you can stand out – by going the extra mile and always having the freshest produce.”
Eventually, the brothers opened a second stand at the market – operated by their parents. Sales grew, they started ordering whole pallet loads of some products, and by 1987, opened their first store in a mall in the neighbouring suburb of Richmond. More stores followed, but the focus remained unchanged – ask any Kin’s Farm Market employee who has worked in one of their cramped coolers.
“We keep our coolers in our stores very small, only about 200 square feet,” says Chu. “Our business is not to store produce, but to sell it.”
You can see that philosophy in products such as Kin’s “jet fresh” pineapple.
Before deciding to sell pineapples, Chu and the Leungs first flew to Maui to visit the grower in person and then made the bold decision to have their orders flown to B.C.
“Two days after they are picked, they are at the Vancouver airport and the next day we are selling them,” says Chu. “If you send them by ship, you’re looking at 14 days before you can have them on the shelf. Many stores sell pineapples for $1.99 but we sell ours for $1.99 a pound, or about $10 for a pineapple. People are surprised by our price until they taste our pineapples. Then they see we are offering a very good value.”
Being dedicated to freshness isn’t always easy. There was the time a tractor-trailer load of nectarines suffered a sharp drop in quality after being fumigated at the border. The fruit was okay but was quickly going soft so 400 cases were donated to a food bank.
In the early years, Kin’s Farm Market strayed a bit from their focus, adding products such as rice and eggs to boost sales volumes. But at a family retreat they decided they would stick to fresh produce and that’s when Chu came up with company’s motto: “We sell freshness.”
“This is a very important thing,” she says. “It’s not just something we say to our customers, but something that our employees have to know: If you’re going to sell fresh produce, then it better be fresh.”
It’s such a simple concept that it’s easy to miss its power. Until you think of that eight-foot-long table in Granville Island and what it gave birth to.
