San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour

Welcome back to the Happy Half Hour! This week, we’re chatting with Rachel Shemirani, senior vice president at Barons Market. Barons is a gourmet grocery store that was founded by a local family in Point Loma and has nine locations in San Diego and Riverside. Rachel's father, Joe, started the business in the early ’90s because he couldn’t find an organic grocery store that sold food he enjoyed. Rachel and her sister, Dana, started working in the stores as cashiers when they were in high school, and now they both hold leadership positions in the company. Rachel oversees advertising and marketing, and is also the gatekeeper for new products—she leads weekly food panels to hand-select new products, which involves 40 people sampling anywhere from 80 to 120 different products, and whittling down the best. Rachel says that everything sold on Barons’ shelves has made the taste testers’ cut. We chat with Rachel about how they compete with large grocery chains and what sets them apart, how they’ve been weathering the