A fresh idea and fresh food at Kim's Produce

There is more than just fast food in Detroit, there is also fresh food. Kim's Produce is one of the places in our large city that sells the real stuff, not the prepackaged, dollar hamburgers. Yet, people aren't bustin' down the doors to buy the tomatoes. The Detroit News's Donna Terek puts together the story of Kim's Produce.

Excerpt from the Detroit News:

Kim and Hollis Smith left the affluent Ann Arbor marketplace to fill what they saw as a void in the food landscape in Detroit. Five months ago, they opened Kim's Produce, a storefront full of fresh food on Woodward at Willis in Detroit's Midtown.

Fresh food, in a city that has no major grocery store? Customers must be beating down the doors!
Um, no.

"When we first opened up here it would be pretty much Kim and I playing Scrabble," says Hollis, 42. "We would look over at McDonald's right across the street and their line would be wrapped around the building, out onto Woodward, causing traffic confusion, and people would wait. We would want to just go out and say, 'We've got fresh options over here.'

"But I think those golden arches are just like magnets, and some people are just hard-wired to feel that pull. And it just pulls people to McDonald's -- almost like zombies."

They're not doing the volume they did at their roadside stand in Ann Arbor. "Last summer we went through 150 pounds of tomatoes a day," says Kim. "Here we sell 10 pounds in two days."

Read the entire article and see the multimedia piece here.