NORTHAMPTON — In the late 1970s, an old department store on Main Street was renovated and turned into a popular indoor mall for numerous smaller stores and a few restaurants. One of the early tenants of the newly christened Thornes Marketplace was Cornucopia, the health food store that opened in June 1980.
About a year and a half later, a young graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst was hired to oversee the sale and purchase of its nutritional and health supplements, a key part of Cornucopia’s stock and its overall mission (the full name of the store is Cornucopia Natural Wellness Market).
Now, a bit over 40 years later, Iain Stewart is finally calling it a career: The guy who’s been called a “guru” of health supplements and is Cornucopia’s longest-serving staff member is working his last day in the store today.
Stewart, who recently turned 68 and lives in Northampton with his wife, Marilyn, says he’d been thinking about retirement for a while, especially since the pandemic arrived and reduced foot traffic in the store.
“I think after 40 years in retail, and turning 68 earlier this month, I was ready to try something new, something not involving retail,” he said during a recent interview at the store.
He’s a Reiki master who’s considering developing a part-time practice in that — “I could give people free nutritional advice as an incentive to come,” he joked — and he’s also hoping to devote more time to his photography and playing guitar and keyboards. A longtime bicyclist, he’s looking forward as well to doing more riding with spring not far away.
Looking back on 40 years in the health food supplement business, Stewart, who graduated from UMass Amherst in 1977 with a degree in plant and soil science, notes that a considerably larger number of products are available today. Overall customer interest in areas such as herbal health products has also grown, he says.
But Cornucopia had a pretty strong customer base for that right from the start, he adds.
“I’ve always encouraged customers to educate themselves, and a lot of our customers are pretty well educated — they know what they’re looking for,” said Stewart, who grew up in Chicopee. “I’ll help them find a particular product or brand or try to give them other options.”
In Cornucopia’s early days, he says, health products were more limited. “We mostly had conventional vitamins. There were some cutting-edge companies … that introduced fermented vitamins. But you didn’t have the great variety of companies and products that you see nowadays.”
He’s focused a lot of his research over the years on brands that he says “have done clinical studies on their particular formulas, and today there are are a lot of trademarked, patented herbal extracts that have been clinically shown to be effective for certain therapeutic values. That wasn’t happening at all” in the early 1980s, he says.
One supplement he personally uses and that he says is also popular with a lot of customers is curcumin, which is derived from turmeric and has been shown to combat inflammation. “But it’s also good for brain and liver health and other things,” he said.
That’s a good general rule, in fact, for a lot of natural health products, says Stewart, who writes about these issues on a blog on the Cornucopia website.
“I think here’s always been interest in alternatives to pharmaceuticals because of their known harmful side effects. People more into a natural lifestyle would come in asking for alternatives (because) unlike pharmaceuticals, many herbs have beneficial side effects.”
Stewart was hired in January 1982 by the former owners of Cornucopia, Bud Stockwell and Sydney Flum-Stockwell of Northampton, after he’d previously worked at a health food store in Springfield. Stockwell says Stewart came to Cornucopia already well-versed in supplements, and he quickly built a strong rapport with customers.
“Iain was always the guy our customers most wanted to speak with,” said Stockwell. “I’d see someone (looking at health supplements) and I’d say ‘Can I help you?’ and he’d say, ‘Well, is Iain here?’ and I’d say ‘He just stepped out for a bit — he should be back in 10 minutes.’ ”
With a laugh, Stockwell added that such a customer would invariably say “‘I’ll wait!’ Iain was just so appreciated.”
Flum-Stockwell called Stewart “a wonderful guy” who was particularly good at gathering feedback from customers on which supplements did or didn’t work for them and using that, as well as his own research, to determine what other products the store might consider making available.
“His relationships with customers and his own research were always a strong point for us,” she said. “He’s earned a good retirement.”
Cornucopia’s current owners, Nate Clifford and Jade Jump, who bought the store from the Stockwells in 2019, had previously worked for Cambridge Naturals, a small health food chain in eastern Massachusetts. Clifford says he’d already heard about Stewart before he and Jump moved to this region in 2015.
“Iain had a good reputation” in Massachusetts health food circles, said Clifford, who recently wrote a tribute to Stewart on Cornucopia’s Facebook site. “He was considered kind of a guru — there was a bit of a mystique about him.”
There are no immediate plans to replace Stewart, Clifford said, as he and a couple other staff members also have some background in health and nutritional supplements; Stewart said he’ll also be available to sub on occasion in the store as needed.
But as some point, said Clifford, they’ll need someone to take Stewart’s place: “We’ll miss his level of expertise and customer knowledge.”
In an interview, Stewart also reflected on the changes he’s witnessed in downtown Northampton and in Thornes over 40 years. “One thing that blows my mind is that Jade and Nate weren’t even born when I started working here,” he said.
He says there was also “a lot of energy and camaraderie” in Thornes in those early days among the staff and owners in the new stores, such as the former Beyond Words Bookstore and Dynamite Records. “We were all in our late 20s and early 30s, and downtown Northampton was really coming alive … There have been so many changes since then.”
Indeed. Stewart jokes that he originally opted to study plant and soil science at UMass — he took a few nutrition courses, too — because he dreamed of buying land in Vermont and growing marijuana, and he thought his degree might help: “It was the ’70s!”
That idea didn’t pan out. And yet today “everybody is growing pot,” he said. “Talk about change.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazenette.com.