Health-food pioneer brought joy and high standards to Marlene’s Market

Home was a two-story grocery store with a deli in the back, menus from around the world framed in the cafe, and an office space with shelves full of Mariners bobbleheads and Aflac ducks.

Home for Marlene Beadle was her grocery store in Federal Way.

Beadle, founder of Marlene’s Market & Deli, died June 16 after a six-year battle with cancer at the age of 85. And although she’s been laid to rest, her spirit lives on within the market, the employees, and every time someone wrings out wet towels the way she specified.

Beadle was born in Port Angeles, Washington, in 1934. She grew up riding horses, hiking in the woods and playing outside with friends, said Lisa Gebhardt, Beadle’s eldest daughter and general manager of both the Federal Way and Tacoma locations for Marlene’s Market.

“Port Angeles is a small town and everybody knew everybody, so that may be why it was so special to her,” Gebhardt said.

Beadle met her husband, Irv, in high school and started going together their senior year. Both went to then-Washington State College. Two years in, Beadle and Irv were married and started having kids — but Beadle never went to business school. Gebhardt said her mother had a natural instinct for the business.

“I always admired that she was always able to make some big decisions at just the right time,” she said.

Irv worked with Boeing and the space program, so the family moved to Florida and later Alabama, and didn’t return to the Pacific Northwest until 1969. In ‘68, though, Beadle read Lisa Clark’s “Stay Younger Longer” and was sold on healthy, natural foods.

Beadle told the Federal Way Herald in 1993 that the book changed her life.

“This book was like an itch that needed to be scratched in my life,” she told The Herald.

After that, all of the Twinkies disappeared from the house, Gebhardt said, and the family ate fruits, vegetables and whole grains. However, there were the occasional cheat days.

“She always said 85-90 percent (of the diet), moderation in everything,” Gebhardt said. “You need to have flings every once in a while. She loved her chocolate chip cookies — everyone needs treats.”

In 1972, at the age of 42, Beadle bought House of Health Foods, where she had worked as a store clerk for about three years. She renamed it Federal Way Health Foods, but later named it Marlene’s Market & Deli.

“I was in school in France and she wrote a letter saying, ‘I bought the health food store,’ and I was like, ‘really?’” Gebhardt said. “I was surprised but not surprised because she loved it so much.”

Gebhardt said she and her two siblings, Tim Beadle and Jennifer Lehman, worked at the market during college and high school, and it was actually pretty fun to work with their mom.

“You could just see how much fun she was having, the joy she had talking to people,” Gebhardt siad. “She loved it. She loved talking to people all day, showing them things, hearing about them.”

Gebhardt said her mom would be walking around and people would come up to her and ask, “Aren’t you Marlene?”

Kim Henish, store director, 23-year long employee and longtime friend of the Beadle family, said Beadle’s fame even spanned across the world.

“She has that good of a reputation for upholding those standards,” Henish said. “ She was bigger than life. She did something that I’ve never seen another store like it.”

In 1973, the natural foods business was really just lifting off the ground, said Joe Wade, a former broker who sold to Marlene’s Market, client manager at Impact Group and member of the Board of Directors for Provender Alliance.

“There was not even an inkling that any of this would still exist in a few years back then,” Wade said. “The trade was being invented right before our eyes right in that period of the 70s.”

Wade said he had heard of Marlene’s Market back in the day, but didn’t have a reason to go in until he was tasked with selling, or rather attempting to sell, new products to her. He said it was always a quick meeting when he walked into Beadle’s store.

“We all knew what a hard thing it was to sell to Marlene,” Wade said. “She had a perfectly clear idea of what the product standards were for her store. There was no equivocating whatsoever. It didn’t matter if a product came to the market and was selling wildly, successfully in any other place, any other retailer. None of that mattered if it didn’t meet Marlene’s ingredients standards and didn’t promote a real healthy diet from her perspective. There was no arguing her into any other position.”

Her ideals and standards, though, are what helped her success.

“Frankly, it revealed to anybody who thought in order to sell a natural ice cream or a natural potato chip or a natural bread...you have to make it as much as possible like the conventional alternatives that are available in the chain stores,” Wade said. “Just think about Marlene’s store — no, there doesn’t have to be any compromise made at all. She was an inspiration.”

Wade said Beadle’s market was regionally important, meaning if someone was new to the Pacific Northwest or new to health foods, they new about Marlene’s Market & Deli.

“I don’t want to give you the wrong impression, there was not a Marlene cult,” Wade said. “But that’s a preface to me saying I don’t think there was anybody who was seriously in the natural foods trade or the natural foods community in the Pacific Northwest who was unaware of Marlene or the Marlene stores.”

Eventually, Beadle moved the store from House of Health Foods’s original location to two others, but eventually settled in the old REI building at Gateway Center Place. In 1996, Marlene’s Market & Deli expanded to Tacoma on 38th Street.

Beadle was also committed to educating patrons and her employees about the importance of healthy eating — she annually sent employees to the Provender Alliance conferences that focuses on educating the community on natural foods.

She also implemented free classes in the markets and started the Sound Outlook, a monthly magazine produced by Marlene’s Market & Deli, to better present information and spread the word about healthy foods.

“She wanted to provide education and a place to be able to purchase and live that (healthy) lifestyle to her community, but to her employees, too,” said Trisha Hansen, category manager for the market and 19-year employee.

Hansen said Beadle would go throughout the store and talk to customers about what they had in their baskets.

“It was really cute to see that connection that she had with other people, even if they didn’t know who she was,” Hansen said. “She would really connect with her customers and customer service was really always number one for us.”

Everything was for the customers’ benefit for Beadle, even the way she instructed people to wring out the wet towels.

“She had a particular way of doing things that she taught to everybody,” said Henish, Beadle’s longtime friend. “I still, to this day, I do things how Marlene would like them done. That’s kind of my motto, ‘what would Marlene do?’ That’s what I have made my decisions on for a long time.”

Even though Beadle was business-oriented at work, she still liked to have fun. Throughout the store, she was a well-known prankster.

For a long time, Beadle kept a fake spilled yogurt cup and would place it on keyboards or desks.

“That thing, we finally threw that away because it crumbled, it was so old,” Henish said. “She had a bowl on her desk, I think, (filled with) camel poop that looked like chocolates. She had them on her desk and people would walk in, she’d say, ‘would you like one?’ and they would say sure and she would go, ‘no, that’s camel poop.’”

The camel poop came from Beadle’s travels in Tunisia when she rode a camel in the desert with a group of women — Irv, her husband, was not into the idea.

But whether it was for mischievous pranks or not, Beadle always had a smile on her face, Gebhardt said, and her mother’s smile is one of the things she’ll always remember.

This story was originally published June 28, 2019 at 10:59 PM.