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GREENSBORO — Brett Berry looks like the poster boy for a family business. He's blond, blue-eyed, in khaki pants and a casual dress shirt. Cradled in a chair in his office off Green Valley Road, Berry talks about "experiencing the food."

That's among the key phrases the 40-year-old chief executive of The Fresh Market tosses into the conversation. He says it over again, just as he repeatedly jokes that company employees all "bleed green" — The Fresh Market's color.

But Berry also can be pretty straightforward when talking about the company his father dreamed up and started in Greensboro 25 years ago.

"We're in the business of replicating what we do," he said. "We're very good at being in the business of business."

From one store on Lawndale Drive in 1982, The Fresh Market has grown to more than 70 stores reaching along the East Coast and into the Midwest.

Since 2004, the private company has grown its total stores by nearly 20 percent each year and built up to 6,500 employees working in cities from Milwaukee, Wis., to Boca Raton, Fla. At its current growth rate, The Fresh Market could have more than 170 stores in five years.

Such expansion poses challenges to the company, which aims to keep its stores feeling intimate as it grows. Company officials, though, are confident they can find a balance even as they take The Fresh Market far from its Greensboro roots.

"We think that The Fresh Market is not a regional chain," said Mike Barry, the company's chief financial officer and Brett Berry's brother-in-law. "It's going to be a national chain, and it's moving in that direction."

Building a boutique grocer

Ray Berry, who founded The Fresh Market and was CEO until handing off the title to his son, Brett, this year, finds himself busy with corporate business as the company grows.

"The fun's going out and being in a store, and talking to customers, and delivering products, and sourcing good products and figuring out a way to do it better," said Ray Berry, 67, now chairman of the board.

From the start, though, he was focused on replication.

In 1980, he quit his job overseeing 3,600 7-Eleven stores for The Southland Corp. He and his wife, Beverly, set out to open a market-style grocery store focused on perishables and customer service.

The Berrys sold their home in Dallas, packed their two children in the car and took a road trip to find the right location. Ray Berry's research showed that the Southeast had plenty of secondhand real estate — stores left behind as supermarkets moved into larger spaces — and notably high returns on grocers' investments.

"I thought in a smaller city it would be easier to become a big thing," he said of choosing Greensboro. "In a larger city, we'd need more stores."

He incorporated The Fresh Market Inc. in 1981 and opened the first store the next year, funding it with "virtually everything we had outside of the equity we had in the house."

The boutique concept, where shoppers could pick up a single peach, choose a cut of steak or sort through loose produce, came at a time when supermarkets still sold trays of meat and vegetables wrapped in plastic.

With what he'd seen in stores on the West Coast and learned from convenience stores, Ray Berry thought his concept was solid. That, however, did not make the launch less stressful.

"The most frightening time was the week or so before opening," he said, "when we put all this work in it, this money in it, and we had all this product that was going to perish if no one comes, and you don't know if they're coming or not."

Shoppers did come, and kept coming. Within two years of the first opening, the family opened stores in Asheville and Hendersonville. Ray Berry would not provide financial details, but he said the business was profitable almost from the start.

That's not to say everything came easy. Natural cosmetics and vitamins sold poorly. Aged steaks and quality meats were new territory.

"I took the first year really trying to figure out what we were doing," Ray Berry said.

As the company opened one or two stores each year, a few flagged. After a decade in High Point, the store on Main Street closed in 1993. Officials said sales did not meet projections.

Ilka Aughtry, a Fresh Market employee for more than 20 years, was one of the workers relocated when the High Point store closed. As deli manager on Lawndale, she has seen the retailer introduce some of its most popular products, such as rotisserie chicken.

Aughtry, in her 50s, said she has had opportunities to move up. The Fresh Market promotes almost wholly from within, particularly on its operational side. But she loves food, her job, her customers, and the classical music played in the store.

"They just take care of you," she said of her employer. "I've grown with them."

Meeting the competition

"It's better to grow quickly," said Ray Berry, "before someone else can figure out what you're doing and copy it."

When his first store opened, there was little competition.

Skip forward 25 years, though, and The Fresh Market is vying for shoppers in a much-changed industry. Discounters such as Wal-Mart and Costco stand on one side, with niche players such as Whole Foods Market, Trader Joe's and local grocers on the other.

Traditional supermarkets are stuck in the middle. Some, like Stop & Shop, have fallen prey to consolidation. Others, such as Matthews-based Harris Teeter, have bulked up produce, prepared foods and specialty offerings.

Compared to these retailers, The Fresh Market is small.

"Overall, they have really an insignificant market share," said David Livingston, a Wis.-based supermarket analyst.

Even in its home state, The Fresh Market is a little guy — with 12 stores and just 0.43 percent of the market, according to data from Trade Dimensions and Shelby Publishing.

Whole Foods, with five stores in North Carolina, has 0.59 percent of the market; the Austin-based company's stores are twice the size of the average Fresh Market.

Still, analysts said The Fresh Market's focus on high-profit perishables instead of low-margin packaged foods is sound.

"Who are we?" asked CEO Brett Berry. "We are freshness. We are perishables.

"Who are we not?" he asked. "We are not canned beans."

That allows room for new stores in seemingly saturated markets like Chapel Hill. It also leaves room to grow into the Midwest and open in middle-class and suburban markets without specialty stores.

"We're kind of evolving from this small, family-owned company to something a bit larger, and that's hard," said Mike Willett, manager of the Lawndale store. His is the last of three Triad stores being moved and expanded in 2007 and '08 — at a collective cost of about $10 million.

Local shoppers have had mixed responses to the relocations, such as the recent move of the Guilford College-area store to Jefferson Village. Willett has customers who rave about the new store, but others prefer to shop the smaller Lawndale store until it moves into a new shopping center next door early next year.

Most of the company's recent stores are similar to Jefferson Village in size and layout.

Analyst Livingston has seen a difference between the Fresh Markets, based on location. "The further away they get from their home base," he said, "I have noticed that the operations have deteriorated a bit."

Fresh Market executives said a comparable number of people work at all the stores. The key, he said, is repeating what the company does well and hiring the right people while growing.

Unafraid to change course

Ray Berry, his son and his son-in-law hold the top spots at the closely held company.

Family members hold the private company's shares.

That, though, could change.

For a family with a relatively young company, the Berrys seem pragmatic about their investment. They're not aghast at the idea of taking the company public — or selling out.

Father and son said they don't necessarily relish opening The Fresh Market up to the quarterly demands of Wall Street, but neither would rule out an initial public offering.

"Wall Street loves us," Brett Berry said.

By going public, The Fresh Market could generate capital to support further growth. Right now, though, the company doesn't need that money. So the only reason to go public would be to start the family's gradual exit from ownership.

That's a possibility, Ray said, if running the company ever hampers running the family.

"I think it's very common with family-held companies for families to get the idea that they identify with the company, and the company's the family and that it's not about the money," Ray Berry said.

"And yet, in reality, it really is about the money."

Contact Michelle Jarboe at 373-7075 or mjarboe@news-record.com