It all started when…

After 26 years in the medical field, I was finally ready to move on and start my own business. Working in hospitals in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio and heading out West to Denver and finally settling in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I decided to open my own specialty food store.

I have always been around many different types of food coming from a very diverse neighborhood in Cleveland and eventually ending up in Food Service School, Fort Knox Kentucky, thanks to Uncle Sam. I wanted my store to be different and unique from other stores I’ve visited so I set out to find rare, delicious and reasonably priced food products from anywhere in the world I could acquire them. With that core concept in mind, my journey began and in June 2010, I opened up my store, Olive Grove, in Santa Fe.

Constantly on the lookout for the most unique and rare products I could find, I decided to also keep an eye open for a little larger store back East since I had been out West for 14 years now. After a lot of searching I knew I was ready to trade the dusty warm scenery of New Mexico for the seasonal beauty of the Northeast and as luck would have it, I found the perfect spot in my present location in Freeport, Maine.

Moving the store from Santa Fe to Freeport made me realize the store was changing and new ideas were opening different possibilities, so I decided to keep the core ideas the same but start over with a new name, a little bigger store and a mixed selection of foods and gifts from smaller businesses producing small batch, high quality products. With those ideas Grand Gourmet Foods & Gifts was born, so come see for yourself why we are called “The Little Store with a Lot of Taste”.