Beautiful Food With Purpose: Inside Windrose Provisions' Platform for Local Makers
Full of neighborhood cafés, boutiques, and family-owned storefronts, Mission Street in San Marino, California, has become a go-to destination for residents. Among the businesses lining the street is Windrose Provisions, a specialty market where customers come for fresh produce, lunch, and locally made goods. But beyond the baskets of seasonal fruits and vegetables, the groceries tell a larger story. Loaves of artisan bread, locally made hummus, and pints of ice cream sit side by side, each representing a business that started with a single idea. Behind all of it is Catherine Welch, who never planned to build a store around other people’s products at all. What started as a source to sell produce from her farm, Windrose Farm, has evolved into a new opportunity for locally owned businesses to sell their products.
“Windrose primarily sells a lot of local produce from Windrose Farm, but also other farms that we work with in Santa Monica,” Welch said. “Being so involved in both the farming world as well as small businesses, I felt like there was a need in the South Pasadena and San Marino area to bring a lot of what’s offered at farmers markets over to our area. Sometimes on Wednesdays after farmers markets I have produce left over. We need a place where we can offer this to our community.”
That instinct to share extra produce grew into something bigger. As a woman running her own business, Welch said she felt a responsibility to make room for other local entrepreneurs, not just her own farm.
“I felt it was really important to elevate the voices of other local small businesses by supporting them and having a space where they could show off their products and do pop-ups,” Welch said. “We do that by buying from them and having their products on our shelves.”
However, creating space for local makers required more than just adding products to shelves. It meant finding the people behind them. Welch said she began seeking out small businesses through social media.
“A lot of it is social media,” Welch said. “I follow a lot of influencers and creators that specialize in food, so we really make an effort to support them. There are a lot of makers that have partnered with us and done quite well themselves. I don’t necessarily seek people out now, but a lot of people who have products that they want to grow and share will approach us. It’s always fun to have them pop up [at Windrose Provisions].”
Among some of the products that have grown since partnering with Windrose Provisions is Larchmont’s Best Hummus. What’s now a product carried in over 50 stores, including some Bristol Farms locations, began with owner David Karp trying to replace a hummus brand he grew up with in Philadelphia, one that stopped existing after the company shut down in 2014. For a decade, Karp searched across Los Angeles looking for something that tasted the same before ultimately deciding none of them were the same.
“I realized that the product I loved only had six ingredients,” Karp said. “I realized I could buy those ingredients myself, so I went out just to make it for myself. I played around, learned how to make hummus in the process, and made [hummus-making] my hobby.”
Karp said his hobby later turned into his full-time profession after sharing with his friends and family.
“It was unintentional,” Karp said. “I gave it to some family and friends, and then their friends and some of the family started calling me and asking me where they could buy it. My stepmom said I should make this into a company.”
Windrose Provisions was one of Karp’s first 10 retail accounts, back when he had no distributor and was building the business entirely on his own. Karp said when he first began, he was drawn to smaller, independent stores over larger chains, but being part of Windrose specifically has been special. It's given him a direct relationship with the people selling his product, and access to a community he said he wouldn't have found on his own.
“I started in a couple stores to see if people were going to buy my product at all,” Karp said. “It started to do really well, and we’re in farmers markets and are just trying to grow. It’s really cool working with Provisions in particular. I love working with local stores that provide great produce and support independent brands like myself. When I started, [my hummus] definitely felt like a boutique product, so I thought it was a really good fit to work with more independent stores. [Windrose Provisions] had given me the opportunity to demo my product on the street and show it to the people in the neighborhood and build a following.”
While Karp sought out independent retailers as he worked to grow Larchmont’s Best Hummus, other businesses found their way to Windrose through a different path. Out of Thin Air Bakery owner Alessandro Jang said their connection began when Windrose reached out to the bakery when the business was still operating out of an apartment kitchen in Echo Park.
“Windrose Farms reached out to us when they were opening their retail store in Pasadena while we were still baking out of our apartment,” Jang said. “We popped up there a couple of times in the beginning, but we didn't have enough delivery routes to make daily deliveries, so it wasn't the right fit at the time. Fast forward a few years, and now we're operating out of our own bread factory and are grateful to be working with them again.”
As a wholesale bakery, Jang said their partnership with Windrose Provisions is incredibly meaningful, not just for Out of Thin Air, but for the wider network of makers Windrose supports.
“Our success is directly tied to the success of the businesses we serve,” Jang said. “If our partners thrive, we thrive. Our goal is to provide the highest quality bread and pastries possible so [Windrose Provisions] can continue serving their customers with confidence. Windrose does a great job of highlighting local farmers, food producers, and small businesses. They create a space where local makers can grow together, and by supporting them, they're also helping strengthen the entire local business community.”
For Alexa Norlin, founder of Normal Ice Cream, that sense of community shows up in something as simple as seeing her product on the shelf next to other local businesses.
“It's honestly the best part,” Norlin said. “Los Angeles has such a strong community of small food makers doing things right, and getting to sit on a shelf next to people we genuinely respect feels like being part of something bigger.”
Beyond creating a sense of community, many of the businesses carried by Windrose Provisions also share a commitment to quality ingredients and thoughtful craftsmanship. Norlin said this alignment is part of what makes their partnership so special.
“We're picky (in the best way) about our dairy — Rosehill Dairy, a family farm in northern Utah, is our number one— and source produce and mix-ins as locally as we can, working with companies like Couplet Coffee, Gjusta Grocer, Caputo's chocolate, etc,” Norlin said. “If it's not good enough to eat on its own, it doesn't make it into the base!”
Norlin said that same attention to detail is what sets Windrose Provisions apart from any other grocery store.
“Windrose feels like it was curated by someone who actually loves the food they sell,” Norlin said. “Every product there has a reason to be on the shelf!”
The relationships Windrose Provisions builds with local makers also reflect a larger goal: creating a more transparent connection between customers and the food they buy. Welch pointed to the recent cyclospora outbreak tied to contaminated lettuce, a case that took weeks to trace back through the supply chain, as a reason why sourcing from small, known farms matters.
“It’s been fascinating to watch the farmers markets and the farmers specifically who grow lettuce like thrive because they are such a small farm and they're not this huge industry,” Welch said. “They very much know who picked their lettuce, what farm it came from, and what path it made from farm directly to the markets rather than sitting on trucks for a while, or being in storage coolers for a while. So it's really neat that [the cyclospora outbreak] is a perfect example of one of the reasons why it's so important to have alternatives like small, local farms.”
The sourcing, relationships, and traceability all contribute to what Welch wants people to feel when they walk into her store. Welch said Windrose Provisions’ tagline: “Beautiful food with purpose,” echoes exactly that.
“Not only is it that [our customers] are getting the experience [of visiting our store], but that they can actually connect and feel that they're making an impact, person to person,” Welch said. “Sometimes these days we lose sight of what we're doing things for, or why it's important to support a business. I love when people come in, and I'm working because I love getting to talk to people and hearing their stories and how they found us.”
This connection shows up most with her regulars. Welch said many of them sign up for Windrose Provisions’ weekly farm box and come back to talk about what’s in season.
“It's fun to introduce our stuff to someone and then see them on a weekly basis,” Welch said. “It's really lovely to highlight special items that only last a few weeks, but we forget that because you're able to get everything at the grocery store, shipped in from South America or other parts of the world where they can grow things when we can't in this hemisphere. It's really great to have those conversations and just continue to educate people on the food that they're eating.”
Karp said that same idea, community over scale, isn't unique to Windrose Provisions, pointing to Los Angeles businesses like Dave's Hot Chicken and Courage Bagels that started small before growing into household names.
“I think everything starts as a local business, more or less,” Karp said. “It's your own community. A lot of times you buy a can of Pepsi, and that money doesn't stay here locally; it doesn't support the local community. LA is so cool because you can come here with an idea, and if people get excited about your idea, you can grow into a big business. But hopefully you always retain what inspired you to start.”
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