New Faces Running Bushes Bunches Family Farm and Produce Stand

The Smiths aren’t new to farming, nor to Alaska. Zach grew up in Anchorage and the Mat-Su; Karianne met Zach in Oregon, and they came up together to work for the Bush family several years ago. They were seasonal workers for four years, Karianne says, with the couple taking up cooking and waitressing jobs in Palmer during the winter to make ends meet. The couple took a break from Alaska and returned to Michigan, where Karianne’s family ran a dairy farm. They helped run the dairy and created a vegetable farm of their own on the side. Through that time, Karianne says, Bruce and Vickie kept in touch and occasionally reached out to see if they were ready to come back and run Bushes Bunches.

By 2024, the Michigan dairy had been sold and the timing was right.

“Once we didn’t have my family’s dairy farm, there wasn’t as much keeping us there. We really liked to farm, run our own business and all that. We decided ‘OK, let’s do it.’ We spent about a year selling our home and getting ready, and Bruce and Vickie needed to get their house ready for us,” Karianne says.

The two families lived together on the farm while Zach and Karianne took over the day-to-day operations and, later that year, began to focus on the year-round produce stand.

It wasn’t always easy. “There was a lot of prayer and a lot of faith,” Karianne says. “But we pushed through and things started to get better and better.”

New Ideas, New Products

The Bushes Bunches Produce Stand has been an area where growth has been visible. It’s taken a mind shift, from selling what was available—which meant empty shelves in the winter, when local produce sales were mostly done—to reaching out to new vendors, working to establish new relationships, and becoming a beacon for Alaska Grown.

“My mindset was, let’s fill the shelves up, so people want to come here. They [Bruce and Vickie] had the principle of Alaska grown and made. I love that. I love the spirit of Alaska entrepreneurs here. That’s been my number-one focus: Anything grown or made here, I save shelf space for it,” Karianne says.

There are jams and salsa and fudges made by a local school board member’s family; there are six local bakers who fill the shelves with sourdough and wheat loaves, bagels and more; there are beautifully packaged tins of fish from Klawock and bags of deliciously smoked Tradish Fish from Sitka. Alaska Range Dairy’s glass bottles of milk (and plastic jugs) are on refrigerator shelves, along with yogurt from the Delta Junction herd.

Karianne says between 10 and 20 percent of the vegetables on the shelves in winter grew at the Bushes Bunches farm—mostly potatoes, carrots, and winter squash. In summer, that percentage jumps to about 75 percent, but there’s still lots of room for other local produce.

The store doesn’t solely sell Alaska grown items. Karianne says they try to stock what people ask for. Many local residents wanted items they might otherwise get through Azure Standard, a natural health food distributor that ships everything from maple syrup to bags of chicken feed at drop points in different communities—twelve in Southcentral. Now, some of those items can be found on the Bushes Bunches shelves.

“That made a lot of sense, and it made our customers happy,” she says.

Full-Circle Business Model

Now, instead of empty shelves, the store is full to bursting. Karianne says her biggest issue is not having any backroom space, and not having freezers where she could sell Alaska-grown meats. Growth has been challenging—it’s a lot of work, coordinating with local vendors, ordering goods, and sometimes driving out of town to pick up orders—but the work is boosting the store, she says, and having a “rising tide” effect for the small businesses whose goods are on the shelves.

“A lot of our bakers have upscaled and gotten industrial ovens. As we grow in our sales, their businesses have grown, too,” Karianne says.

Barnacle Foods in Juneau—maker of kelp pickles, kelp salsa, barrel-aged bullwhip kelp hot sauce and more—sells rhubarb jam made from Bushes Bunches rhubarb, which is then sold at the Old Glenn Highway produce stand. Wasilla-based Alaska Food Co., which sells freeze-dried foods, makes freeze-dried mashed potatoes from Bushes Bunches’ spuds—also sold at the produce stand. Those value-added products complete a circle of Alaska-grown goodness.

The Smiths say they couldn’t succeed without the help of great employees and partners. A partner manages the fair booth; several employees help customers at the store. Their children pitch in as well. It takes a village.

There’s a little bitter with the sweet, Karianne says.

“My family farm was over 100 years old, and that was really hard to go through. I couldn’t save that. But [this has] saved us, too—it’s been a huge blessing for my family. Everyone appreciates us continuing to farm the land and provide fresh produce,” she says.