“We opened the first week of July 1984,” Munchrath tells the Observer. “My dad was about to be a senior in high school and what he didn’t know was that I was going to be born a year later."
The humble neighborhood market specializes in all things healthy with food and supplements catering to every dietary need. When you enter through the automatic sliding doors, you'll see food on your right, supplements and hair and skincare on your left and a vegan cafe in the middle. There's a wall of picture-perfect fresh produce, a frozen section with gluten-free and keto versions of treats like pizza and ice cream, and seeds and beans you can purchase by the pound.
What you won't find much of at Ann's is processed junk food items or the logos of big-name corporations. Many of the products here are locally sourced.
You'll barely make it three steps inside before an employee offers to help, and Ann's is a place where it might be in your best interest to accept. Munchrath and his staff are experts on their products and will help find whatever you were looking for and then some. If you come to Ann's in search of iron supplements, for example, they can help you find iron-rich foods to pair them with as well.
"We want to be a one-stop-shop for everything," he says. "We've got to let them know that there are things they can eat and not have to just take pills. We really want to change their lifestyle to where they don't even have to take pills, even if it's pills we're selling."
Ann Munchrath entered the health food business looking for these kinds of solutions for her own family.
"Grandma got into it because of her mother having diabetes," the younger Muchrath says. "Wanting to help out, wanting to know everything she could about diabetes. That's kind of how it started. Dad realized that this was a good business to be in when he had a child and needed some steady income."
Ann's has served its community dutifully and opened three other locations across North Texas in the years since, outlasting decades of challenges from corporate rivals and growing pains. In the eyes of the family behind it and its regular customers, the past 40 years is a legacy worth celebrating. Oak Cliff resident Ed Vonder is a second-generation Ann's regular. He grew up within walking distance of the store, and his parents shopped there from the time he was 10 years old.
"My parents took us there when we were young, me and my sister," he says. "My dad was a diabetic, and my mother suffered from kidney failure. Ann's always had good, healthy vitamins and stuff. Even when they got up in age, they never stopped shopping."
As Vonder grew up, he encountered health issues of his own that Ann's was able to help alleviate.
"I served two years in the Navy and I came back a disabled veteran," he says. "When I got back, the VA tried to give me a lot of medication that I knew it wasn't healthy for me because I saw what it did to my dad. My dad was a Vietnam veteran. He served two terms in Vietnam. I served in the Gulf War. [...] Ann's was very good to me on, you know, being able to go to them and take something healthy with side effects that wouldn't affect me later on in life."
Even as major chains like Sprouts and Whole Foods that sell comparable products pop up around the area, Vonder remains a loyal fan of Ann's.
"Corporations are all about quantity, not quality," he says. "Ann's will take you basically by the hand and sit down with you, talk to you and go over your history. It's more personable."
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"That's why we have customers coming back for 20-plus years," he says. "They feel like they're going to see the same faces. They're going to see me or my brother or my sister when she was here. My dad is still at the Waxahachie store pretty much every day. Yes, it's a grocery store and, yes, we do sell items that other people have. But our knowledge, our care for our customers, [...] That's one of the biggest things is the pride we take into this every day. Because of Grandma and because of what she started and her name being on this store."
Munchrath says that his main vision for the next 40 years of Ann's is a little more personal than just growth and franchising.
"I want my great-grandkids to be running this store someday," he says. "It's not every day that your family has a business that's been going that long and you know it's yours and have the opportunity to keep it going."
The last thing Munchrath shows us before we let him get back to work is a collage of family photos hanging in the supplements section. He takes the frame off the wall so we can see it better and points to all of the family members he told us about during our chat, including himself as a child, his father and Grandma Ann herself. We're standing in a building that contains a longstanding, successful and growing business where he is the boss, but these photos are what Munchrath seems to be proudest of.
