By David Fenimore
These days, local folks have plenty of options for fresh, unprocessed, and additive-free food from New Moon Natural Foods and the Tahoe Food Hub to seasonal farmer’s markets and specialized aisles at local supermarkets. But back in the 1970s, when “natural foods” was a term mostly associated with the hippie counterculture, there was only one place to go: We-the-People Natural Foods Co-op in Kings Beach. When a 1981 fire closed it for good, it seemed as if healthy eaters would be stuck having to drive to Reno — or worst case, to Auburn — for their groceries. That is, until a long-time local with a desire to change the world stepped in.
Mark Calhoun was 6 when his family moved to Tahoe from Palo Alto in 1956. They had bought what is now River Ranch, then called Deer Park Lodge, and operated Powder Bowl, the little ski area that once stood at the entrance to Alpine Meadows. During the 1960 Winter Olympics, Calhoun’s parents hosted ice hockey officials, and he remembers attending matches at the old Blyth Arena.
After attending the University of Utah, Calhoun returned to Tahoe in 1978. “I had to pick a place to make a stand on Planet Earth,” he said, “and I loved growing up here, playing along the Truckee River.”
Calhoun was possessed by a youthful aspiration to change the world, and “quality food was where he felt he could make a difference,” said his wife of 36 years, Joy Waite. Calhoun began volunteering at We-the-People and was soon serving on the board. When the co-op closed, he decided to carry its mission forward. He reached out to core co-op members and other interested parties, asking them to invest in a new store. They agreed to form a limited partnership.
In 1983, Calhoun and his first wife, Melinda, opened the Tahoe Community Store in a tiny cottage on the West Shore next to Firesign Café. A year later they moved to a larger space at the corner of Highway 89 and Granlibakken Road, changing the name to Tahoe Community Market. Over the busy years that followed, Calhoun noticed that many of his customers’ checks bore Truckee addresses. Obviously, it was time to branch out.
“This was a big risk,” recalls Calhoun. “We had no capital.” And there was a family to support. Newly single, he had met Waite, a nutritionist, at a natural food expo in Anaheim. Sharing a mutual interest in biodynamics and organic agriculture, they married in 1988, and by 1992 had two young daughters. Nevertheless, that year they opened the Truckee Community Market in Donner Plaza where MakiAli Sushi is today. “That space was immediately too small,” recalls Calhoun, and in short order he designed and constructed a new and larger store a few doors down, at the present site of New Moon Natural Foods.
In 1994 the couple opened yet another store. Alice’s Mountain Market was located next to the Olympic Valley post office and managed by Calhoun’s sister, Alice. A few years later they turned the Mustard Seed, a defunct health food store in Tahoe Vista, into the North Tahoe Community Market.
This period of expansion was when Billy Griffin entered the picture. Griffin had moved to the area in 1988, and his combination of a bad knee and no health insurance led him to a Chinese acupuncturist who fixed the problem with herbs and holistic treatments. “Growing up in Boston, I had always been a baloney and white bread kid,” Griffin said, “and this was my introduction to natural healing and eating well, that whole new world out there. I discovered that it wasn’t just about eating healthy, but about changing the whole food system. For me, that took it from a personal choice to a professional one.”
Now with four stores to oversee, Calhoun and Waite hired Griffin to help at Alice’s. Their new employee began dividing his time among all four stores and eventually became general manager.
A few years later, the North Tahoe location had to close when the landlord decided to demolish the building. By then, Calhoun and Waite had bought out the limited partnership that had funded their original store, and begun building a home and farm in Grass Valley, a model for low-impact, sustainable living they called Solchanta. Needing more capital, Calhoun sold the Truckee store to Griffin. “I had enough for a down payment,” Griffin said, “and Mark financed the rest. He just trusted me to pay him back. I’d learned the business on his dime, you could say, and he showed me the ropes enough so I could go out and fly on my own.”
In 2000, Griffin bought the Tahoe Community Market and changed the name of both stores to New Moon Natural Foods. Of his former employer, he says, “Mark and I have been friends for 30 years, and we’ve never viewed one another as competitors. We’re collaborators.”
By 2008, the first phase of what is now known as The Village at Palisades Tahoe had been completed, and Calhoun and Waite figured that if another grocery opened there, their sole remaining location might face competition. As Calhoun puts it, they were “already struggling with seasonality.” They were able to move Alice’s to a brand-new Village storefront, where they expanded their offerings to include conventional as well as natural foods, plus beer, wine, and spirits because, as Waite says, “it’s important to appeal to a wider range of visitor appetites.”
An extensively remodeled Alice’s Mountain Market — at 2,800 square feet, their largest ever — will soon celebrate its grand reopening. Since 2020, the store has been managed by Calhoun and Waite’s younger daughter, Sunnee Balsz, and her husband, Andrew Balsz, who moved from the Bay Area to join the business and help bring it into the 21st century with online management and ordering systems.
“Our stores have always been family affairs,” says Calhoun, recalling scenes from bygone days where Waite would be upstairs doing the books and caring for infant Sunnee, while he would be on the floor working the register with Ayla in a backpack. As early as elementary school, the two girls were part and parcel of the operation, including one winter evening when the power went out and the kids helped customers shop and check out by flashlight. The tradition continues with the Balszs’ 18-month-old daughter, Carina, who can sometimes be seen soaking up customer attention and, when she has a free moment, stocking the lower shelves within her toddler’s reach.
It’s tempting to read this as the story of an entrepreneurial couple, but the word “community” in the names of their first stores is a reminder that it took exactly that — owners, partners, employees, customers, and the supply chain of natural food producers, all working together — to make it happen. Alice’s and New Moon represent a broader and deeper change in the relationship between our bodies and the planet. Natural foods, once a counterculture fad, have now gone mainstream. As cookbook author Christine Muhlke recently wrote, “the hippies may not have won the election, but they are winning the plate.”
