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Rouses Means Local Growth by David W. Brown

farmers, as much as we could at the time. But whatever we were selling, he stressed to us to buy local.”

The first Rouses grocery store opened its doors in 1960. Called Ciro’s, it was a 7,000-square-foot store in Houma, Louisiana. Anthony and Ciro hired two employees. Fifteen years later, Ciro retired and sold his share of the business to Anthony’s son Donald, and the store was renamed to the now-familiar Rouses. In 1975, the father-son team opened their second store in Thibodaux, Louisiana. Within two decades, Rouses would expand to become the largest independent grocer in Louisiana. Today, the company is made up of 64 stores across the Gulf South and is run by CEO Donny Rouse, a member of the third generation of family members to keep the store going. Three things were key to the success of the company: community service, a spirit of entrepreneurship and the merging of those two ideas, a determined effort to help local producers grow alongside Rouses. “My grandpa would always make sure that the local guy got a fair shake,” says Ali Rouse Royster, a third-generation owner of the company. “If they’ve got a product, we’ll put it out there. He was always favoring the local guy, the local farmer, the local fisherman, the local manufacturer and anybody local with a new product. And if they had passion, it was always: ‘Okay, yes, we will definitely put you on the shelf.’ Giving the community a hand up has always been what we strive to do.”

Before Anthony Rouse founded Rouses Markets, he was in the shipping business. City Produce Company, founded in Thibodaux, Louisiana, by J.P. Rouse, Anthony’s father, was an Italian immigrant’s gambit to support his family and, later, a desperate attempt to survive the Great Depression. “In those days you had to do what you had to do if you wanted to put bread and food on the table,” says Tim Acosta, the director of marketing & advertising for Rouses Markets. “They were doing that just to survive — you’ve got a truck, I’ve got hands. Let’s get to work.” The Rouse men would buy produce from local farmers in the area. Shallots and cabbage and potatoes — some would be sold in the French Market, but most would be packed up on rail cars and shipped out to other parts of the country, as nearby as Chattanooga, and as far away as Alaska. Anthony and his cousin, Ciro DiMarco, took over City Produce in 1954 when Anthony’s father died. When the duo later opened their first grocery store, that devotion to buying local only intensified. “He would always buy from local farmers,”says Donald Rouse, the chairman of the company and Anthony’s son. “He grew up being a farmer and he got along well with them. He put farmers and fishermen high on the list, and we learned to respect them from him, and how to work with them. From an early age, I was buying produce and paying cash to the

26 MARCH•APRIL 2020