Ware Neck Produce celebrates 40th anniversary

Ware Neck Produce, a beloved cornerstone of Gloucester Main Street, is celebrating its 40th season in the community.

“We’re grateful, the way we’ve been accepted here … supported,” said Jim Williams. He and his wife, Kim, opened Ware Neck Produce in 1985 and began growing fruits and vegetables for the produce market on their farm. “We raised our family, our kids are gone now, but we raised them with the money we made here,” he recalled. “It’s lucky that you can stay for 40 years anywhere, ’cause things change all the time.”

Though changes are inevitable, the store has continued to be a dependable source of fresh, local goods. “We were here before Walmart or anybody else. We were here when Main Street, that’s all there was, was Main Street,” Williams explained. “I have kids working here that their parents worked here too,” he said.

It is the quality of produce sold at the market, Williams said, that makes Ware Neck Produce stand out to the community. “We do have fresh stuff, good stuff, you know, that we feel like we know what it is, where it comes from, where it’s produced. Something that I take home all the time, so I don’t mind selling it to you or somebody else. I think our customers know that. We’re consistent in that.”

Some of the fruits and vegetables sold in the store are grown on the family’s farm, as well as some locally in Virginia. “We source a lot of local stuff, you know, if we don’t have it,” Williams said. For seafood, they try to source from the Chesapeake Bay and Outer Banks, if they can. “We try to get everything from the Chesapeake Bay, you know, oysters and clams and crawfish, and things like that. And then, some of the more exotic fish like tuna and things, we try to source Outer Banks, something like that.”

Baked goods are the same, as they find from bakers local to Virginia. “We have two local bakers now and we get [from] a bakery out of Richmond,” Williams explained. The plants arranged outside of the building for sale are local to Virginia, too, grown in Richmond and Chesapeake.

Produce trucks can be spotted selling in Mathews and Poquoson. “The trucks are mostly our produce,” Williams explained. “They’re not running now, they wait until into May, [the] middle of May, when we start to have more and more stuff on the farm.”

He said he hopes to continue with the market and farm, though his participation is mostly on the farm as they grow more and more produce. The couple has provided a place where customers can trust that what they’re buying is fresh and good, and can help to support local businesses at the same time.

Shopping at Ware Neck Produce helps customers spend their dollars locally and support Virginia businesses. The market opens seasonally, in early spring and stays open until the winter months. Their Facebook page is kept updated and a great resource for new and current products.

Author: Cheyenne Fenton, Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal