Mom's Boy

How the founder of MOM’s Organic Market helped lead the organic grocery revolution.

- Jane Marion

The path to Scott Nash’s Rockville office on the second floor of MOM’s Organic Market headquarters above its flagship store is not exactly what you’d expect from your typical CEO of a multi-million-dollar company. There’s no long hallway with dark woods, no sleek leather chairs, no phalanx of Armani-clad assistants to greet you at the door, or modern masterpieces on the walls. There are no ostensible signs to signal that this is a place of power and influence.

Instead, the road to Nash’s office is paved with recycling bins brimming with denim jeans, boxes packed with organic products, errant grocery carts, and a long, sterile concrete staircase, at the top of which hangs an oil painting of a chimpanzee sporting a smoking jacket. The simian subject sits at a dining-room table before a bowl filled with bananas and hoists a glass of red wine into the air.

“I hung that there to tell people who are coming up to the corporate offices that that’s whose in charge. The painting is really just a reminder for us to have humility,” explains Nash, who keeps a human skull in his office as an additional reminder. “Hubris is a killer of corporations.”

Nash, 51, is the founder of MOM’s Organic Markets and couldn’t be more down-to-earth—or pioneering. Thirty years ago, long before the word “organic” became a buzzword in the grocery world and every consumer had a pesticide-free Winesap apple in his or her cart, Nash got into the organic grocery business.