VERMONT SALUMI | JANUARY 2025
Pete Colman’s creations include AR market, the unique Italian, gourmet, and conventional food market that has been serving downtown Barre since 2020. That business has a roommate, Pearl Street Pizza. But the quiet third resident of 159 North Main Street is also the oldest: Vermont Salumi, founded in 2011. Pete describes Vermont Salumi as valuing process, agriculture, and craftsmanship. As Pete talked me through his entrepreneurial journey, I could hear constant echoes to how those values had informed the decisions he’d made along the way. If I could sum up his basic business mantra it would be that if you make a very, very good thing for people, they’ll come buy it. Simple, really. Yet in my work meeting with business owners every day, this simplest of concepts is definitely the hardest to get exactly right. Pete is a popular guy in Barre. When I meet with business owners, they often refer to advice Pete has given them. It’s another quality Pete has as a business owner that I admire: the deep rooted knowledge that the better we all do, the better we all do. He understands that the work he does is part of the supportive constellation of what makes the downtown he selected for his business, Barre, thrive. Pete has a good sense of the roots that got him to where he is now. Growing up, his parents ran Cate Farm. He tells me this and I get that flash of possessiveness one tends to get about an absolute favorite Vermont producer. “Cate Farm that makes the--” I say but get a half second pause in remembering the product I know them best for. “Beautiful seedlings,” Pete finishes, and I remember the cheeriest of vegetable seedlings that seem to dance in the sunlight every late spring at the Hunger Mountain Co-Op. The absolute joy of those little plants is definitely something you can feel just walking by.
‘It’s the stream that feeds the village’
Pete says to me, agreeing with the idea that working together is the strongest move for a small Vermont-based business. Later I go Google this thinking it’s a famous quote but there are zero results so it’s straight from the mind of Pete Colman, I think. The very first few years transitioning away from the family farm were filled with extremely hard work with forestry products company Vermont Wildwoods. Pete than gradually began bringing different threads of Vermont Salumi alive. He was a critical part of the successful Mad River Food Hub, founded the same year as Vermont Salumi in Waitsfield. As the business began to scale, Pete worked on stabilizing the margins. There were a few years where revenue was pretty flat. Then Vermont Salumi grew enough to support investments in better equipment. Pete co-packed for other producers of similar specialty food products and found ways to maximize efficiencies in the process. He never took his eye of quality, or the pure inspirations of why he loved the product he made. One summer, Pete led a trip with the Northeast Organic Farming Association to Italy. The trip was educational, for farmers and people who work in agriculture and other food pathways roles, to tour slaughterhouses, farms, and schools all over Italy.
In 2020, Pete opened AR Market. It was an unpredictable and difficult year for many businesses, and a year full of changes and fast growth for Vermont Salumi.
Pete described all the vision of the market to me with a lot of enthusiasm. It evolved over time and in response to the pandemic, and the evolution never seemed to frustrate Pete. Each time his customers voiced something they needed AR to be, Pete thought about how to do it. The first vision had been more of a specialty market, but the store added a wider range of basic grocery products when people who lived very close by asked for those things to be stocked. As detailed as Pete’s vision for the market was, when I ask him about the day-to-day choices now: product selection, social media, ordering, he says all those things are well-managed by an excellent and independent staff. I’ve met them--I agree! The store definitely carries the lightness of a place managed by people who value working there, and value the role of the business in the community. The kind of store you might walk into just to tell someone something, even when you didn’t have anything to buy.
Pete tells me about a scenario where a slicer could be shared between Salumi and another producer, and his eyes lit up on the savings that it brought both businesses. That was probably the most inspiring thing about talking with him about his work--how genuinely he believed in collaboration. And how he could prove it out now, time and time again, as being a method of work that helped his business grow and do well. Pete describes researching a bunch of different ways that Vermont Salumi could grow, describing some of the work he’s interested in, both in fermenting and in slaughter. And as always, he talks about the great people he’s been meeting who do that work, and how excited he is about working with them. I also appreciate that he’s realistic about all this collaboration. I ask him what’s hard about having three businesses under one roof here in Barre. He laughs. A lot of things! Each business has its own set of priorities, its own urgent decisions for the day. So how do they all keep it cool? They just accept that they have to compromise.
The need for housing is impacting the community Vermont Salumi serves so deeply that Pete cites it as the business’s top concern as it looks to the future. Vermont Salumi will continue to work to feed the community, grow the business, and keep operations efficient as we head into 2025.
Location: 159 North Main Street Barre, Vermont 05641 Contact: info@VermontSalumi.com
