For 48 years, Nature’s Harvest has offered natural and organic foods, supplements, and a health-minded community on Main Street in Blairstown.
In early November, a social media post announced that due to increased challenges in the business environment, the store would soon close.
“Our last day of business will be Nov. 25th, 2025,” read the Facebook post, dated Nov. 4. “From the bottom of our hearts we thank you for welcoming us into this beloved community.” The post ended with a cursive flourish bearing the names of the two owners, Neil and Hema Persad, who owned the store since 2014.
The post saw over a hundred reactions and many comments lamenting the store’s closure. Despite the outpouring of appreciation for the store and hopes for its rescue, the end seemed near.
Then, on Sunday, November 23, the story suddenly changed. Nature’s Harvest had found new owners willing to write the next chapter of its long existence.
At Saturday’s Jingle on Main, Michael Ashkenazi and Diane Devine hosted a table and handed out flyers introducing themselves as the new owners of Nature’s Harvest. And with their invitation to new and returning customers to join them at the store starting Tuesday, December 2, with an eye toward sharing ideas that can shape the store’s future, they’re wasting no time getting started.
Nearly Half a Century of Natural Foods
The story of Nature’s Harvest begins in the late ’70s with Beverly and Michael Cook. Michael had lived in Blairstown since he was 13 years old. After a brief time living in Easton and elsewhere, he and Beverly moved into a house in Blairstown in October 1976, where Michael spent the rest of his life and Beverly still lives today.
The two wanted to open a business in Blairstown. They decided on a natural food store—an innovative choice at the time, before the mainstream popularization of phrases like “eat clean.”
The last business to occupy Nature’s Harvest’s current space on Main Street was Branigan’s Pharmacy, Beverly Cook recalls. The pharmacy first opened in Blairstown in 1876. Cook remembers seeing remnants of the pharmacy’s products still on the shelves, including medicinal herbs.
The space suited the Cooks’ needs perfectly. In April 1977, they opened Nature’s Harvest at 28 Main Street. Cook had three children at the time: a seven-year-old son, a nine-year-old son, and a daughter who was eight months old at the store’s opening. Cook would bring her to the store during those long early days of the business, staying some nights until 7 p.m.
The family ran Nature’s Harvest for two and a half years before selling it to Lee and Gretchen Parrish. Michael Cook would later open other natural food stores, ultimately finding success as a natural and specialty food broker. Three of the Cooks’ sons still attend Natural Products Expo West, a convention for natural and organic products that saw 65,000 attendees this year. Cook’s daughter and granddaughter also work for a natural and specialty food broker.
“So yep, we’ve kept it in the family,” Cook said.
The Parrishes ran the store for nine years before selling it to Michelle St. Andre in 1988.
Michelle St. Andre would steward the store for 26 years, the longest tenure of any of its owners. Prior to her ownership, the store was limited in size due to the other business occupying the other half of the same building. In the late eighties, that business was a sewing shop called the Needle Niche. Once the owner of the Needle Niche retired, St. Andre and her husband bought the entire building and expanded Nature’s Harvest into its current 1,100 square feet of retail space.
The store remains “near and dear” to St. Andre’s heart.
“I’m very lucky, with a wonderful staff the whole time, and they too wanted to be involved in the community,” she said. “I made some wonderful friends with other people in the community.”
The store was even the site of her very own meet-cute. One day, a man walked into the store with a list of supplements that his mother had sent him to buy. He asked St. Andre for help. The two got to talking. To make a long, romantic story short, the two are married to this day.
“So it was really an incredibly wonderful opportunity for me when I bought the store,” St. Andre said. “It really worked out beautifully for my life.”
Changes, Fads, and Lessons Learned
When the store first opened in the ’70s, natural food wasn’t yet part of the national conversation, Cook recalls. Natural food stores were still rare, and online stores didn’t exist yet. So Nature’s Harvest met a unique need that nothing else could fill.
The meaning of natural, healthy eating has evolved in the decades of the store’s existence, too.
Cook has seen the emergence of new science debunking the old. For a while, she recalls, fat was seen as the ultimate nutritional enemy. Later, more data emerged pointing toward sugar’s role in a variety of negative health outcomes. She’s also seen the emergence of more conversations examining the long-term impacts of consuming seed oils and genetically modified crops.
In her long ownership of the store, St. Andre also remembered the rise and fall of fads in nutritional health: the carb-free diet, the high-protein diet. Now, she says, the focus is on simplicity, with more people interested in preparing their own foods in order to avoid heavily processed, ready-made meals.
Meanwhile, interest in eating healthy has reached the mainstream. Grocery stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s include natural, organic, and health-conscious options with a variety of dietary restrictions in mind. Even traditional grocery stores like Acme and ShopRite include organic and specialty options on their shelves now.
St. Andre acknowledges that natural, healthy eating is no longer the niche topic it once was. But there’s one advantage for a store like Nature’s Harvest that ShopRite can’t replicate.
“You can buy food anywhere online,” she said. “I think what’s important is to be able to develop a relationship with your customers, which they can’t online.”
The Next Chapter for Nature’s Harvest: Community and Reinvention
For Nature’s Harvest’s brand new owners, that element of community is key, especially for Diane Devine.
Devine grew up with a different Blairstown. Her grandparents owned a 321-acre dairy farm here, and her regular visits showed her a charming small town with a variety of businesses on Main Street: a bakery, a candy store, a five-and-dime where she bought a swimsuit back when Lake Susquehanna was open to the public.
Later in life, the emotional pull to Blairstown brought her back. She spent 17 years on Wall Street and 25 years in hospitality; her husband Michael Ashkenazi had spent almost 50 years as the owner of his own engineering company. When it came time to retire, Blairstown felt like the natural, long-awaited choice. They moved to Blairstown part-time in 2017 and full-time in March 2020.
Ashkenazi’s first project was to open a cafe in Blairstown. While working on the space, local artist and carpenter Don Stettner mentioned a local store on Main Street that was closing down and might be selling its shelves and fixtures, useful finds for a new cafe.
That’s what brought Ashkenazi to Nature’s Harvest two weeks ago, for the first time. The products on the shelves intrigued him. So did the sad mentions by employees and customers of the store’s imminent closure.
He and Devine saw an opportunity, both as a business and as a chance to help Main Street Blairstown.
“I think that one of the things that attracts people to small towns is small-town living,” Devine said. “And part of small town living is having interesting stores and places… and a sense of community. It’s nice to walk up and down Main Street, pop in a store, whatever, run into your neighbors. I think that that sense is somewhat coming back.”
Ashkenazi agreed, pointing to the healthy crowds that patronize nearby Buck Hill Brewery nearly every night. “There is a craving for socializing” post-pandemic, he said, and a growing fatigue with the large online stores like Amazon that have decimated small businesses over the past couple decades.
Both Cook and St. Andre remember a thriving community of health-conscious customers who did their own research, asked sharp questions, and grew to trust the staff at Nature’s Harvest over time. Ashkenazi and Devine are betting that more people yearn for that sense of community beyond the screen.
They point to a more health-conscious generation of young people. Members of Gen Z are more likely to prioritize health-conscious dietary decisions, including eating more plant-based or vegetarian/vegan diets, and avoiding unhealthy habits like drinking alcohol. And even if the success of the health food movement means that all stores now carry healthy and organic options, gathering them in one place, in a single store, where everything is natural and organic, makes life easier and more accessible for customers.
“It’s like walking into some kind of a shrine,” Ashkenazi said, only half-joking.
The married couple have a number of ambitions for the future of the store. They hope to offer tastings to customers of everything from olive oils and vinegars to baked goods from local bakeries, a variety of cheeses and coffees. They also hope to host educational opportunities like regular visits from a nutritionist and experts on holistic and natural remedies.
Later down the line, they hope to complete an ambitious renovation of the space. But their priority right now is establishing continuity for the store by taking over ownership and establishing themselves as a presence—as soon as Tuesday, Dec. 2.
“It’s going to provide an opportunity for us to listen to the clients, to the customers, and get their feedback and find out what they want, what they might find valuable, you know, to see if we can accommodate that. So it’ll be kind of a listening experience for us,” Devine said.
With only a week and a half between the decision to buy the store to officially assuming its leadership, Ashkenazi and Devine have had full schedules.
At first, Ashkenazi said, “Diane thought that I was crazy.” But after nearly 50 years of running his own engineering company, he could never have a quiet retirement with nothing to do. “In comparison to what I did before, to me, this is almost a cakewalk.”
He added, “I’m not scared at all. I actually like the challenge.”
Nature’s Harvest will remain open at 28 Main Street in Blairstown. To check its social media, visit https://www.facebook.com/NaturesHarvestNJ/.
Chip O'Chang is an educator, fiction writer, and lifelong resident of New Jersey. He has also written for My Life Publications and NJ Indy. He lives in the NJ Skylands with his partner, two cats, and and a bearded dragon.
- Chip O'Chang, Contributing Writerhttps://ridgeviewecho.com/author/chip-ochang-contributing-writer/
- Chip O'Chang, Contributing Writerhttps://ridgeviewecho.com/author/chip-ochang-contributing-writer/
- Chip O'Chang, Contributing Writerhttps://ridgeviewecho.com/author/chip-ochang-contributing-writer/
- Chip O'Chang, Contributing Writerhttps://ridgeviewecho.com/author/chip-ochang-contributing-writer/
