Keeping a variety of home goods and food staples on hand has always been the hallmark of the quintessential small New England general store: something for everyone. But when the Internet offers the convenience of shopping from the living room and supermarkets draw shoppers looking for quantity at the same time a widespread economic malaise is going on, it’s more critical than ever to attract customers.

In the Monadnock region, the small businesses that operate as general stores are feeling the pinch, and as reported about the Hancock Market last week, it’s a continuing struggle to remain viable.

But at least one local store owner who sells a variety of everyday merchandise believes that the key to success combines the diversity of product with the ability to make sure that certain of those products are items that stand out from the rest.

When Jason Martel thinks about diversifying, it’s not just about being able to offer everything from hammers to hand warmers and from beer to batteries in his shop, the Francestown Village Store. Martel, who owns the store with his wife, Jennifer, started selling handcrafted, prepared meals at the store and people responded.

“The idea was to offer the town some variety,” said Martel during a recent interview at the store. “And I saw it as a good way to control our inventory.”

The Martels started selling the prepared and frozen meals about five years ago (they’ve owned the store for seven years), but just recently got their USDA certification, which means they started selling Francestown Village Food items wholesale in November.

While the soups and casseroles that started catching on five years ago are what caught the locals’ attention, and were initially sold out of a small free-standing freezer in the middle of the store, Martel was thinking big and started formulating a plan that would attract customers from beyond the Francestown environs. He wanted to create a homemade prepared-food brand that used natural ingredients that were sourced as locally as possible.

In the first few years he discovered he was on to something, but to make it profitable, he would have to expand his ability to make meals and get them out to stores besides his own.

Finding kitchen talent

One of the Martels’ favorite places to eat is Pearl Restaurant and Oyster Bar in Peterborough. They quickly discovered that the reason they loved it so much had to do with the talents of then-Executive Chef Mike Webb.

Webb, a ConVal High School grad, started working in restaurants as a teen and jumped into it fulltime after he graduated high school. And after working at a number of establishments, he says he really started refining his art at Acqua Bistro under the tutelage of owner Dave Chicane.

Then he really honed is craft at Pearl, another of Chicane’s creations, and Webb became its executive chef and worked there for five years.

Meanwhile, Jason Martel would have a Webb-prepared meal and then talk to the young chef, lobbying him to come join Martel in his new business of creating prepared meals to be sold out of his almost 200-year-old village store.

Webb finally signed on with Martel 14 months ago and the two struck a partnership in Francestown Village Foods. (They are also partners in a side catering business that operates on the slow foods philosophy.)

When Webb arrived at the store, which earned the nickname The Long Store sometime in the 19th century because of its frontage along Main Street, he said a tiny kitchen on the second floor just above the store’s main counter contained a nice commercial stove and oven, but little else. He got to work creating a food-preparation kitchen that would lend itself to an efficient process for creating complete meals packaged in containers sized for individuals, couples and families.

Now he has just shy of 1,200 square feet above the store divided into four rooms arranged in a square so you can pass from room to room by continuously turning to one direction. They are kept spotless and are clad in bright white paneling. The first, which contains the stove and stainless-steel worktables as well as a large commercial steel sink, is the prep room where the recipes take shape. Next to that is a large space where the meals are weighed, divided into different-sized portion containers and packaged. From there, the packaged meals go to the freezer room where a set of bench freezers rapidly chill everything to
minus-20 degrees. Labels go on the containers and they are boxed for shipping in the last space before being taken downstairs and out into the 12-foot by 12-foot walk-in shipping freezer that was recently built into the store’s former garage.

A distribution deal

Since Webb has come onboard, Martel says the store has sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 to 26,000 pounds of Francestown Village Foods — most of it consumed locally. Martel says that, estimating conservatively, they’ll probably exceed that amount by five times this year because of the new USDA certification that enables them to ship products to be sold at other stores.

As a result, Francestown Village Foods is now being sold in more than a hundred stores throughout New England as part of a deal with a cooperative called Associated Grocers of New England.

The products amount to almost 70 different meal offerings sold in single-serve to two-pound containers of entrees, soups, stews and gourmet pizzas. Webb prepares Mexican meals, Italian food, comfort dishes, a number of quiches, curries, side dishes and specialty pizzas. All of it labeled with ingredients, Martel says, that customers readily recognize.

Webb is also proud of the fact that the ingredients he cooks with are sourced as freshly and as locally as possible. He said that when he was cooking at Pearl he developed an understanding of the importance of using local resources.

“It’s really the concept of farm-to-table,” said Martel, “It’s not just that it’s local products, but the customer gets a hand-made healthy meal.” And, he says, at $12 for two pounds of an entrée, two people can eat well and inexpensively.

“The fact that it’s convenient and tastes really, really good doesn’t hurt,” he said.

A program that works

And while loyal customers — Martel says regular customers come into the store from locations as distant as Concord, Keene and Nashua — have been cultivated through efforts like offering more than 450 beer selections, 300 wines, regular wine tastings, and specialty coffee roasts, Martel noted that selling the hand-prepared meals helped grow the store’s customer base.

And he thinks the meals Webb whips up might help out other small stores as well.

“This offers all those single-door stores an entirely new category,” he said. “And adds so much more importance to that store because they offer something unique to the community.”

“It’s not just the food, it’s the whole program,” said Martel, explaining that while selling Francestown Village Foods is obviously good for his business, it is also a benefit to the other small markets selling the meals. “We’re selling them a category they’ve never had. We’re educating them to a new business model.”

Martel pointed out that in the last year and a half, many stores like his have closed up shop and that it was important that others feeling the pressures of diminishing earnings consider changing their ways of doing business.

“If we can keep a few more stores going,” said Martel, “it’s good for everyone else.”

Though the new distribution program has just recently begun, and Martel employs five fulltimers and three part-timers, he is already planning on a major expansion of his Village Foods operation.

He says that he hopes to build a new food-preparation facility with offices, a larger kitchen and preparation rooms as well as a 40-foot by 100-foot freezer to handle the impressive volume of food that Webb and his crew will need to prepare to keep up with store demand. And with that expansion, he said, the company will hire more workers.

“We just want to make sure that we are moving ahead in a smart way,” he said, “while maintaining a quality product. That can’t change.”

“I want someone to be able to walk into this store if they are having company that night and walk out with a meal they can be happy with,” said Martel, and from anecdotal evidence, so far, people in the Monadnock region are happy with Francestown Village Foods meals, and that now apparently extends to customers throughout New England.