Wilton Organic Gourmet Offers a Social Experience

Peter Leventhal has been the owner of Wilton Organic Gourmet for about 40 of his 64 years. The store was never just a job or a means to get by, he’ll tell you: it’s always been his passion.

These days, though, passion doesn’t always guarantee success. Since the Internet emerged, Leventhal’s sales have been slipping because of the low prices online for the same products that he offers.

“(Popularity has) gone down a little bit because you’ve got, all the big stores now carry what I do and you’ve got the Internet. And the basic generic stuff that I carry, everyone has,” Leventhal said. “The Internet will probably be the death of – and the big stores – the death of all the small stores. There won’t be any left. It’s just gonna be big stores and the Internet, which I think makes for an ugly landscape.”

But he’s not giving up on the dream he’s pursued since college.

“I think with the competition and all I might end up with so little that it won’t really be worth staying open anymore,” Leventhal said. “I don’t know, it’s on the edge, (we’ll) see what happens. I would like to stay because I enjoy it.”

Leventhal added that the experience of a small store, as opposed to the Internet or a large chain store, has an irreplaceable personal effect.

“Having these smaller stores … has a sort of spiritual feel to it. I think that anything like that is only positive, it can only make your life more rich, spiritual, emotional,” he said. “People come in here for lunch, and they know each other, and they stop and they talk and they get into discussions and laughter and, you know, there’s music, and it’s just not corporate.

“They leave their corporate environment to come here and that makes them healthier, just that alone.”

He also warns of greater long-term effects that could arise from the death of small stores.

“There’s also a danger in this industry, and that is, I see more and more labels that make claims that 10 years ago would be illegal to make, where they raise potencies of different things really high,” he said. “Like vitamin D, they just jump right on a few studies and all of a sudden it’s OK to take 10,000 units of vitamin D when it used to be 400 was what’s acceptable. I think that as an industry we’re jumping too fast into too much, and that could possibly cause problems.”

Leventhal, a New York City native, attended the University of Bridgeport and majored in psychology, returning to school after about 10 years to earn his Master’s degree in clinical nutrition. He then began living his dream in 1974 with the store’s first location in Greenwich.

In 1987, Leventhal moved the store to its current location at 33 Danbury Rd. He refers to himself as a “Wilton boy,” and though age has brought its share of difficulties, he has no immediate plans of slowing down or stopping, continuing to teach Tai Chi at the Wilton YMCA and waking up before 6:30 a.m. each day to prepare the store for opening.