Jim and Cindy Smith are the new owners of the Adna Grocery Store.
Jim Smith, who owns Uncle Jim's Smokehouse and the Adna Grocery Store with his wife Cindy, talks about the business Thursday. The Smiths reopened the store Monday.
Jim Smith greets a customer at the Adna Grocery Store Thursday. Smith and his wife Cindy recently purchased the store.
The Adna Grocery Store, recently purchased by Jim and Cindy Smith, will carry more local products, like this honey, as it becomes established, the owners said Thursday.
Cindy Smith helps a customer check out Thursday at the Adna Grocery Store. Smith and husband Jim recently purchased the store and are now also using it as a retail arm of their business Uncle Jim's Smokehouse.
The past few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind for longtime Adna residents Jim and Cindy Smith. In that short time, they’ve gone from thinking about a retail outlet for their existing Uncle Jim’s Smokehouse business, to taking up ownership of Adna’s Bunker Creek Road grocery store.
In the tiny town, the store has long been a favorite community hangout, and the Smiths’ priority is to keep it that way.
“We want to bring it back to the place it was,” Cindy Smith said. “It’s always been a little grocery store and it seems like it got away from that, we want to bring it back to the community little grocery store.”
After just a few days under its ownership, she said the store was building up a breakfast-time crowd.
“I already have my regulars that come in here for donuts and biscuits and gravy,” she said.
Uncle Jim’s Smokehouse has been around for 18 years, and started as a hobby, the Smiths said. For years, it’s been operatee from their property just a few miles down the road from the store. Cindy, her daughter and daughter in law also have a catering business.
“I started years ago just smoking fish, smoking jerky,” Jim Smith said.
He built his own smokehouse and said the business grew naturally from there. The business does custom orders for hunters, in addition to standard offerings like pepperoni and summer sausage.
“It took a while, it’s trial and error,” Jim Smith said. “I’m sure I sent some stuff out that wasn’t real good at first, you know? Now, I think what really makes our stuff good … I think it’s better than some, maybe not as good as some but the measurements of your seasonings … you have to get it right every time to make the product the same every time.”
Just before Christmas, the Smith’s began taking steps to buy the store.
“We were looking for someplace to put our retail products and the owner of the store gave us a call and told us it was available,” Cindy Smith said. “we figured this would be a good outlet, it would be close and we’ve lived in this area forever.”
They officially reopened Monday. They’re still working to get the gasoline pumps up and running and to get licenses to sell alcohol, cigarettes and lottery tickets again, but should be up to full speed in a few weeks, they said. The building, which also serves as Adna’s post office, has been there since the 1940s, Jim Smith said, and still has its original heavy wood freezer door among other original features.
The store sells a little bit of everything, from snacks and dog food to coffee and hot meals, and of course Uncle Jim’s Smokehouse products. The Smiths plan to expand their offering of local products, which right now includes local honey and their own brand of seasoning.
Running the business has the Smiths literally running — operating the shop from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. — but they plan to have other staff soon. They also plan on putting up a sign visible from nearby state Route 6, and hope the smokehouse products will draw customers to the store from farther away that Adna.
Ultimately though, the Smiths’ goal is to have a place for locals, “where people feel welcome coming in here, they feel comfortable,” Jim Smith said.
