Alfalfa's founders recall origins of natural foods grocer.

• Author: Cote, Mike
• Position: NATURAL FOODS

Their memories may be a little fuzzy-did early investors put up $5,000 or $10,000 each? --but the founders of Alfalfa's haven't forgotten the passion that led them 25 years ago to create a natural foods grocery store that would become a local icon and expand beyond Boulder.

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Wild Oats merged with Alfalfa's in 1996, and Mark Retzloff, Lyle Davis and Sahid Hass Hassan have long since moved on to other organics-oriented ventures. At the Naturally Boulder Days conference in October, the trio shared what they learned during the company's 13-year history. The overriding theme: It's about passion, not making a buck.

"The really successful businesses and the really successful entrepreneurs are not driven by money," Hassan told a few hundred people gathered at the St. Julien Hotel. Hassan's post-Alfalfa's ventures have included founding a chain of natural foods stores in the UK that he sold to Whole Foods Market several years ago.

Alfalfa's offered gourmet foods and organic products that largely weren't available at conventional markets in the early '80s. But the store thrived because it connected to the local community at a time when people craved a sense of neighborhood. At least...