Rapid City, SD – In 1955, a Colorado couple named Margaret and Philip Isely started knocking on doors with loaves of whole grain bread and a small stack of nutrition pamphlets. They’d borrowed $200 to get the thing off the ground. This was the age of Wonder Bread and TV dinners, so telling folks to eat organic produce and food from naturally raised animals made you sound a little odd, maybe even a little preachy. They kept at it anyway. Seventy years later, that same company, now called Natural Grocers, opened its doors in Rapid City.

The new store sits at 855 Omaha Street, right where Omaha meets Mount Rushmore Road. It’s the company’s second location in South Dakota, and it pulls from a wide circle that includes Sturgis, Spearfish, Custer, and Keystone. I got a walk through the place the night before the grand opening, during a free VIP event for the public, and talked with Katie Macarelli, the company’s director of public relations, while shoppers filled their carts around us.

What “natural” actually means here

The word “natural” gets stapled onto almost everything now, which has worn it down to nearly nothing. Macarelli knows this. “Anybody can slap the word ‘natural’ on anything,” she told me. Her company draws harder lines. The produce is 100 percent organic. The eggs start at free range. There are no GMOs on the shelves. Transparency and education sit at the center of how they run, she said, and the crew gets trained to back that up.

“We are not pretentious at all, and our crew is trained to answer those questions,” Macarelli said. So you can walk in knowing nothing about organic certification and still leave with good groceries and, if you want them, a few answers.

They’ve been at this a long time. “We’ve been doing organic since way before it was cool,” Macarelli said. The Iselys were pushing whole foods back when whole foods got you funny looks.

The price question

Prices come up fast at a store built around organic everything, and Macarelli has fielded the worry plenty of times. The company keeps costs down by staying small on purpose. Most Natural Grocers locations run about 13,000 square feet of sales floor, which lets them hold tight relationships with the farmers and vendors who fill the shelves. The eggs are a good example. One of their brands, Contented Hens, comes from “a group of Mennonite family farmers,” she said, and everybody in that chain is pulling toward the same thing.

Macarelli didn’t grow up sold on any of this. “Before I worked for Natural Grocers, I kind of thought, well, what’s the big deal,” she said, wondering back then if organic produce was a price gimmick. The more she learned on the job, the more it clicked. She calls the produce “delightfully affordable” now. The organic baby spinach proved her point while we stood there, a massive container of it going for $4.99.

The stuff that isn’t there

Walk the floor and a few things are missing on purpose. No butcher counter. No big deli. No in-house coffee shop. A lot of that comes down to food waste, Macarelli said. The bulk section is pre-packaged and refrigerated instead of scoop-your-own bins, because bins are tough to keep clean and plenty ends up in the trash. A deli runs into the same trouble. Meat brings a separate concern, since the company likes to know the exact farm, weight, and size behind every cut, and that gets hard to promise.

Then there’s the neighborly reason. “We don’t want to put your local butcher out of business,” she said. “We don’t want to put the local coffee shop out of business. That’s not our jam. Stay in our lane, and we do it really well.” She wants the businesses around the store thriving too.

Three extra minutes

The store hours are the part I keep coming back to. Doors open at 8:27 in the morning. Monday through Saturday, it closes at 8:36 at night. Sundays run 8:57 to 7:36. Those aren’t typos, and they aren’t a grand-opening bit either. They’re permanent, with a reason built right in.

“You might show up and think, oh shoot, I got to get to work, and they’re not open until 8:30,” Macarelli said. “Oh, no, you have three extra minutes, get in here.” Same little courtesy waits for you at closing time.

Three extra minutes won’t change your life. If you’ve ever sprinted across a parking lot at 8:29, you’ll take them anyway.