Like a magician who keeps pulling rabbits out of a hat, the Produce Station Gourmet Market keeps adding products and services at its compact storefront located on a small spit of land on South State Street. 

The Produce Station began as a purveyor of produce, an outgrowth of selling fruits and vegetables wholesale under the Frog Holler Produce name. Over time, it added groceries, then prepared foods and an open-air café and finally bedding and hanging plants. Two years ago, it added beer and wine, a section the store hopes to grow in the future.

Today, inside and spilling out of the same roughly 2,500-square-foot store it began with in 1986, the Produce Station has become a one-stop shop for local food, lunch and dinner on the run, sit-down business lunches and one of the city’s hottest spots for garden plants. It also continues to sell produce. 

“As we grew, our goal was to stock everything you need to make a meal,” said Andrew Gorsuch, Produce Station general manager.

Now, nearly 25 years after he started the Produce Station, Rick Peshkin is preparing to step aside. Craig Schmidt, who has run the store for more than a decade and who became a partner a couple of years ago, will become full owner early in 2011, Gorsuch said. Peshkin will continue to own Frog Holler Produce, Gorsuch said.

Schmidt has worked in the produce business most of his life, first at his family’s Schmidt’s Roadside fruit, vegetable and plant market in Canton when he was growing up.

Schmidt has brought his background in plants and flowers to the Produce Station, expanding that area by leaps.

“He built the plant business,” Gorsuch said. “He likes to say that before he came to work here we only sold 20 hanging baskets a year.” Today, plant sales account for 20 percent of annual revenue, Gorsuch said. 

While the Produce Station has remained on the small peninsula of land on South State Street a mile south of the University of Michigan central campus, it stretches out during the busy spring and summer planting season, setting up a temporary tent in the West Stadium Boulevard parking lot of ACE Hardware and Arbor Farms Market to sell bedding plants, perennials and hanging baskets.

It’s a way to extend the store’s reach while being landlocked, Gorsuch said. “We are locked in here; we have the railroad on one side and the road on the other.”

The Stadium Boulevard location is expected to open at the end of the month. The Produce Station started selling local produce long before it became popular, Gorsuch said.

“In the 1980s, produce was ruled by big box,” he said. But Peshkin, who founded Frog Holler Produce as an outgrowth of his work with Indian Summer Restaurant in the 1970s, had developed relationships with Michigan farmers and decided to sell retail with Produce Station.

Warm weather also opens the 12-table Produce Station Café, where made-to-order lunch is served under an enclosed (but unheated) space at the front of the store. What started as a couple of picnic tables was expanded four years ago when the open air café was built out, Gorsuch said. A grill and a refrigerator are stationed outside between early May and at least September. Three entrees are offered between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. weekdays.

“Our focus,” Gorsuch said, “is the business lunch.”

Prepared foods - from its grab and go selection to the café - have become a growing source of annual revenue, Gorsuch said, accounting for 20 percent of annual sales. The Produce Station has a staff of 15 to support the prepared food operation, including four chefs, along with prep cooks and dishwashers.

The Produce Station has changed along with the customers it serves, Gorsuch said. As the public began demanding more prepared food, the Produce Station expanded its tiny kitchen 12 years ago and brought on executive chef Brian Cromwell.

“When Rick started the store, everyone was cooking all of the time,” Gorsuch said. “But then they started to want quality prepared food, not something you would pull out of the freezer. We went after that.”

But it wasn’t going to be ordinary. Produce Station's grab-and-go meals include entrees such as butternut squash burritos and gnocchi with morel mushrooms, wild leeks and fiddlehead ferns.

“We love the seasonality of food,” Gorsuch said.