Brenda and Matt McCasson bought the Velva grocery store in 2019 and have since made it their own. Photos by NDAREC/Kennedy Delap
When you walk into Velva Fresh Foods, it feels like a small-town hug. You’re greeted by smiling staff and good smells – bread baking, meat smoking or whatever homemade lunch owner Brenda McCasson is whipping up that day.
McCasson and her husband, Matt, bought the grocery store in 2019 from former state legislator Shawn Vedaa, who first hired Brenda as a meat cutter in 2016.
“(Shawn) said, ‘Well, you’re basically doing everything anyway. Why don’t you just buy it?’” Brenda recalls.
Despite taking ownership on the precipice of the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted supply chains and proved challenging for many rural grocery stores, Brenda doesn’t regret the decision.
“It’s very rewarding in different ways,” she says.
She points to two seniors chatting in a nearby aisle.
“That is why we do what we do,” she says.
“Because if we weren’t here, they’d have to go to Minot, and they don’t want to have to do that this time of year,” Matt says.
“It’s also for the busy moms. You know, she’s hauling in three kids and doesn’t have the time (to get groceries) except after picking the kids up from school. We’re here for those things,” Brenda says. “We like to take care of the community.”
Matt agrees.
“The community where I grew up, it’s a suburb of Cleveland, so you didn’t have a close-knit community,” he says. “I’m proud to be part of this, where it’s just a small-town feel, helping out community, getting to know people, providing this for people to help people.”
TO OHIO AND BACK HOME
Brenda grew up on a farm about 5 miles south of Velva. She was a typical farm girl, helping her family raise cattle, crops and goats, and a Class B kid.
“I did all the things, because in a Class B school, you have to do all the things… sports, extracurriculars, you name it,” she says.
While working as a phlebotomist, she met Matt, who was news director at KMOT-TV in Minot.
“I drew his blood,” Brenda says. “He was my type.”
The McCassons lived in Ohio before finding their way back to Velva in 2007.
“I think going there made me realize what a great place that North Dakota is to raise a family,” Brenda says. “I realized that city life wasn’t a good fit for the way our convictions are or the way we wanted to raise our children. Being back home, you know, raising them with their cousins and their aunts and uncles and grandma and grandpa was more ideal.”
FINDING THEIR NICHE
Since taking over the Velva grocery store, the McCassons have made it their own.
An addition allowed for better use of cooler, freezer, storage and back-of-house space. It also freed a section of the store to offer beer, wine and alcohol sales.
On the food side, Brenda’s imprints are everywhere.
The store sells her line of homemade McHenry Fresh Market frozen pizzas, offering the classics and specialties like the Spicy Pig, Hungry Heifer, Mississippi Pot Roast and Reuben. Many of the pizzas feature meats the McCassons smoke in-house.
They bake bread and pastries fresh daily, and their meat cooler is stocked with fresh-cut and in-house smoked meats. One specialty item is particularly special to Brenda – her Grandpa Stan’s smoked salmon.
“We would go to Canada every summer and go fishing. And my grandpa, he was a cook in the Navy, and he’d always bring his little barrel smoker. We would catch fish, throw it in the smoker, then take it off, and we’d walk around camp with this filet of fish and ate it like candy,” Brenda recalls with joy in her eyes. “He was a good cook. I kind of have that spirit of him in me.”
“She’s an awesome cook,” says Brenda’s dad, Verl Bakken, who helps at the store. “When she was growing up, she would use every spoon, every dish, everything we had in the cupboards!”
Brenda offers customers to-go crockpot meals and makes a homecooked “deli dinner of the day.” She describes herself as a meat-and-potatoes gal, who cooks the classic, stick-to-your-ribs type dishes, but with a twist.
“I wanted some real food here (at the store), the stuff that I would like, and actually I get more business doing those homemade things. It takes a little more work, but I feel good about providing better nutrition,” she says.
Her homemade meals have become such a hit that the McCassons also do catering, which has become another successful diversification of their business.
“We’ve tried to create a niche wherever we can, because the regular convention in small towns is getting less and less, so you have to find things that make more people walk into your door for something different,” Brenda says.
The McCassons always have their eyes and ears open to ways they can help their community, too.
They’ll make deliveries, including to the local nursing home, and Brenda encourages store staff to drop in with coffee cake or a treat, just to check on their customers.
“We pretty much know every customer by name,” she says.
Similar to electric cooperatives’ Operation Round Up programs, in which members elect to round up their monthly electric bills to the nearest dollar for local charitable causes, Velva Fresh Foods has a round-up program. Customers can choose to round up their purchases to the nearest dollar, and at the end of the month, the McCassons, who are members of Verendrye Electric Cooperative, round up the total customer donation to the nearest hundred. That money is then distributed to local causes in the Velva community, including school groups, the food pantry, churches, the nursing home and hospice program.
A COOPERATIVE FUTURE
As they look to the future, the McCassons are energized by a new project that has emerged in northcentral North Dakota.
The North Central Regional Grocery and Food Hub is working to develop a cooperative grocery distribution network to strengthen purchasing power of rural grocery stores in the region, lower costs and stabilize store operations. A food hub would also aggregate, store and distribute locally produced foods and conventional groceries.
The idea is independent grocers can achieve more favorable wholesale pricing and improve variety through collective purchasing and redistribution, thereby saving on transportation and wholesale food costs and making their operations more viable.
“I’m so excited about everything (with this project). It has the potential to help so many people, so many ways around,” Brenda says. “This is what we need. We need that buying power we aren’t getting as an independent retailer.”
As a farm kid, Brenda is also excited about the local foods aspect of the project. Through the food hub, producers would have a market for their product and grocers would be able to access locally raised produce and meats to sell at their stores. And having a commercial kitchen available in the food hub creates the possibility of distributing the McHenry Fresh Foods frozen pizzas beyond their store in Velva.
Brenda says the cooperative has the potential to improve retail prices, too, and make small-town grocery stores more competitive with the big-box stores.
“We’re hoping to bring a lot more prices down, if it works like we want it to,” she says.
THE POWER OF COMMUNITY
The McCassons have seen firsthand what the power of community can do.
“We had a car crash a couple of years ago that came in through the front door. … It was just beginning to snow, and it was so cold, this whole wall was caved in. I was freaking out, and all these people just stopped. Pretty soon, I had 15 guys bringing boards from their houses and wherever. They dropped everything that day to help us,” Brenda recalls.
That spirit of community fuels them – and gives them reason to be hopeful for the future.
“We’ve kept this place going. Despite all of its challenges with COVID and everything, how the community has pulled together, and we’re still thriving, I guess I’m proud of that,” Brenda says.
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Cally Peterson is editor of North Dakota Living. She can be reached at cpeterson@ndarec.com
