Founder Stories

Mama's Grocery Wants You to Meet Your Farmer

Ariel and Zach White are opening a bulk grocery store on W. Walnut Street, and they want you to walk out knowing whose hands grew what's in your cart, and how to actually use it.

By Emma Ayala July 2026 Johnson City, TN

Every day, we walk the aisles of Kroger, Publix, Walmart, or Earth Fare and mindlessly place food in our carts. We don't think about the farmer who took out a second mortgage to buy seed for this round of crops, or the one whose fields just got wiped out by flooding. The food shows up on the shelf, and that's usually where our thinking about it stops.

Mama's Grocery wants to change that. Ariel and Zach White are opening a neighborhood bulk grocery store this year at 413 W. Walnut Street, a walkable, one-stop shop where you can buy flour, honey, laundry detergent, and produce, and know whose hands it passed through to get there.

I sat down with Ariel to talk about the name, the leap from software into groceries, and what it's like watching a bank account start to drain before you've sold a single scoop of anything.

Where "Mama's Grocery" Comes From

The name is about as literal as it gets. "I'm a mama, and it's my grocery store!" Ariel told me. She and Zach wanted something that felt comfortable and inviting, a name that signals what they're actually trying to build: a place to feed their community.

Ariel grew up going to a Piggly Wiggly in a small town in North Georgia. It wasn't an overwhelming experience, she said, because there were just a couple of options for each item her family needed. The produce came from a farm stand, and Ariel grew up alongside the kids of the farmers who grew it. "Knowing where your food comes from builds a different connection with both your community and the items you're purchasing," she said.

Leaving Software Before It Leaves Her

Ariel has spent almost eight years in the software industry, work she's genuinely enjoyed. But 2026 has been a hard year to feel settled in tech. According to tracking from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, AI has already been cited in more than 87,000 layoffs this year, 22% of every job cut announced, blowing past the roughly 55,000 layoffs blamed on AI in all of 2025 combined. A running tracker of AI-tied layoffs by company puts Oracle's cuts alone at 21,000 jobs, Amazon's at 16,000, with Microsoft, Meta, and IBM not far behind, all while pouring money into the same technology doing the cutting.

Ariel's job isn't one of the ones eliminated, at least not yet. But watching an entire industry reorganize itself around a technology that's replacing the kind of work she does was enough to make her rethink what she wanted her career to look like. She's not the only one thinking that way.

"While I don't believe my position is in jeopardy at this time, the direction of the industry no longer aligns with my values. I don't want to stay in it long enough to hate it."

Ariel White, co-owner, Mama's Grocery

The same uncertainty pushing people out of tech is pushing plenty of them into business ownership. Entrepreneurs launch new ventures about 67% more often in the months right after a layoff than before one, AI-driven cuts included. More than a million Americans started a small business last year, and interest keeps climbing: 43% of Gen Z say they're considering starting one this year, more than double the rate of Gen X. There are now 36.2 million small businesses in the U.S., employing close to 46% of the private-sector workforce. A career built on being irreplaceable feels less certain than it used to. A career built on something you care about is starting to look like the safer bet. We've heard versions of this story before, like Kevin Sommers walking away from a conventional career to build Some Apparel around the same idea: freedom over predictability.

The idea for a grocery store had been sitting in the back of Ariel's mind for years. This felt like the moment to act on it, not because she had to, but because she wanted to build something around what she's passionate about: feeding her community.

For now, she's running both. Zach keeps his current job as a builder, unless Mama's Grocery turns out to be, in Ariel's words, "wildly successful." Ariel is working her remote position through the build-out, and once the doors open, she'll run the shop during Zach's business hours, with him joining her after his shifts.

As more people step into this era of entrepreneurship, it's worth remembering success doesn't look the same for everyone. For some, success is making enough to live comfortably. For others, it's building a multimillion-dollar company. Either one is fine. It's less about the size of your valuation and more about whether the work gets you closer to happiness, security, and freedom in your own life.

The Paperwork Is the Scary Part

Ask Ariel what's been hardest about starting a business, and it's not what you'd expect. The space was easy. She knew exactly where she wanted to be, and she got it. The money was there to start. What keeps her up at night is the paperwork.

"Getting the business license, establishing the LLC, and getting the permits to operate have been relatively easy to do but are the most anxiety-inducing part of the process," she said. "I don't want to believe that I have everything in order and find out months down the line that I've done something wrong."

She's working through it with a mentor, who's talked her off the ledge more than once.

"It's not the end of the world. There are people who do it wrong on purpose, and I am not one of those people. Just fix it and move on."

Ariel's mentor, on paperwork anxiety

Now that planning is behind them and the build is underway, Zach's background as a builder is carrying a lot of the weight. "I have all the confidence in the world that the build will be done right and on budget," Ariel said. "He's very good at this part, and we're very lucky that he speaks that language."

How Bulk Shopping Actually Works

If you've never shopped bulk before, here's the rundown Ariel gave me:

A few things Ariel wants first-timers to know: you can't mix items in one jar, and there's a "clean scoops" bin and a "dirty scoops" bin so nothing gets cross contaminated. Bins and scoops get sanitized regularly. If you don't have your own container, Mama's Grocery keeps donated jars on hand.

And you don't have to commit to a full container of something you've never tried. "There's no shame in a $0.50 purchase," Ariel said. "We would rather ring you up for pennies than for you to get something that you hate and feel stuck with it."

If you get stuck mid-aisle, she has one piece of advice: "Just turn around and cry for help with your eyes, and I'll come rescue you."

A Store You Can Walk To

Mama's Grocery sits on W. Walnut Street, between the Tree Streets neighborhood, downtown, and ETSU. Ariel expects her closest customers to be people who can walk or bike in, or who pass by on Roan Street or State of Franklin on their way across town.

The nearest comparable stores are in Abingdon, Knoxville, Burnsville, and Asheville, towns people already drive out of their way to reach for refill shopping. Johnson City has specialty markets and plenty of big box chains, but nothing like this close to home. "What we don't have is a one-stop shop in a neighborhood market," Ariel said. It's the same bet behind building something big without leaving a small place to do it.

What's Landing on the Shelves

Ariel and Zach have been showing up everywhere, at the ARC&D farm tour, at local markets, meeting farmers and makers face to face. The response caught them off guard.

"We've had an overwhelming amount of messages from local farmers, makers, and bakers who are excited about the shop," Ariel said. They already have offers for almost every item they intend to sell, and they're now putting together a vendor packet and application to keep it all organized.

Where they can't source locally yet, Ariel wants that gap to be visible too, not hidden. "We want to show you where it came from and why we chose it, until we can find someone who is making it closer to home."

Johnson City already has a track record of packing local makers under one roof. Ariel's approach isn't far off from what's happening at Sentimental Journey's 130-storefront ecosystem downtown, just built around a grocery cart instead of a booth.

More Than a Grocery Run

What Ariel is really after goes beyond the shelves. She wants Mama's Grocery to be a place where neighbors talk to each other, and where people leave knowing more than they walked in with. That's why she and Zach are planning workshops on canning, pickling, foraging, and cooking, teaching people how to use what they're buying, not just ring it up.

It's a small shift, but it changes the relationship. You're not just picking up flour, you know the mill it came from and maybe how to bake with it better than you did last week. "We want to learn together and eat together," Ariel said. That's the kind of food education Johnson City doesn't get from a big box aisle, and it's the kind of relationship she's hoping the whole neighborhood builds with Mama's Grocery, not unlike what Maren Close has built with Lazy Lady Bakery a few blocks over.

Ariel and Zach are conservatively aiming to open by Thanksgiving, with hopes of getting there sooner. The first week will be a soft opening with limited hours, mostly so Ariel can talk to people and learn what to stock before a bigger grand opening, possibly a block party with other shops on W. Walnut and downtown.

Ask Ariel what she wants the store to feel like walking in, and she doesn't hesitate: home. A place where whatever you grab off the shelf is backed by people standing right there behind it.

Ariel carried this idea for years while she built a career in something else entirely. Now there's a building on W. Walnut Street, a bank account that's about to start draining, and farmers already lined up to fill the shelves.

Next time I'm loading a cart at Kroger without a second thought, I might just drive down W. Walnut Street instead.