Any day of the week, at any one of the Turnip Truck stores, you’re apt to see John Dyke, founder and CEO, stocking the produce section. This may be after he had just toured a strawberry farm. John lives his passion for healthy food and for bringing it to Nashvillians.
If Turnip Truck, Nashville’s go-to all-natural grocery store since 2001, were a fruit, a privileged piece of produce that always got to ride shotgun, it would be a tomato. But not just any tomato. The Turnip Truck’s inner tomato would be an odd-shaped one, organically grown in rich, composted soil, deeply red and ripe from summer sunshine and all drippy and juicy with Tennessee terroir.
“The whole idea of my market was that I was really missing the food I grew up with,” says John. Growing up on a farm in Greeneville, Tennessee, John farmed tobacco, herded cows and tended the family garden. But when he came to Nashville after college to sell medical equipment, he missed the produce of his pastoral childhood, particularly heirloom tomatoes, or, as John calls them, “ugly tomatoes.”
So, he decided to do something about it. In his early days in Nashville, John set up a pop-up farmers market in a parking lot, then eventually worked at Sunshine Grocery, a local pioneer in the health and holistic food marketplace.
“I would visit Sunshine on Belmont and would constantly see my neighbors from the east side shopping there,” John remembers. East Nashvillians wanted clean, local healthy food, too, so why not save a trip? (Even then, the east side cool kids didn’t like crossing the Cumberland River unless they absolutely had to.) So, in 2001, John took the leap of faith and opened his own all-natural grocery store on Woodland Street in East Nashville’s Five Points neighborhood.
“In the first year or two, I made some costly mistakes,” he admits. “I poured in everything from my life savings and fought tooth-and-nail to keep that store alive.” But keep it alive he did, wearing every hat in the business as owner, operator and greeter of every customer. And, like a well-tended garden, the grocery store grew.
When he eventually came back across the Cumberland River, to open a Turnip Truck in the Gulch, John planted 30 fruit trees as a step toward fostering hyperlocal agriculture. But John was ahead of his time with that urban farming effort, and trees succumbed to Gulch development.
The fate of those fruits trees proves there is still work to do in raising awareness about healthy, sustainable and resilient local food systems. But John is on the case, making it his life’s work to improve access to healthy local food. “I wake up every day still learning something new in this business,” he says.
Today, John’s love for clean, healthy food nurtures four Turnip Truck stores: East, Gulch, Charlotte and Vandy—which aim to source products from within 200 miles. “There are many reasons food tastes better when it comes from close to home,” John says. “When you pick a tomato that is ripe on the vine, you’re getting something that tastes amazing, looks amazing and smells amazing. Plus, there’s the full nutritional value, versus something that is picked several thousand miles away.”
Turnip Truck’s refrigerators and shelves stock hormone- and antibiotic-free meats, Monterey Bay Watch–certified seafood, artisan cheeses, fresh-ground nut butters, smoothies, coffees, beers and wines, along with organic salad and hot food bars.
John continues to cultivate relationships with local farms, recently adding Rose Creek and Blue Heron farms to his ever-growing roster of local growers. Meanwhile, the former farm kid is returning to his roots, purchasing a farm of his own an hour south of Nashville.
One of Turnip Truck’s goals for 2026 is to work toward zero waste. Remember those ugly tomatoes? Just because they’re not perfectly shaped doesn’t mean they’re not perfect for sauce, stew, salad or other creative culinary projects in the in-house kitchens that fuel the hot and salad bars.
As always, John is determined Turnip Truck will continue to grow as a neighborhood stakeholder, supporting causes like replanting storm-damaged trees, improving local parks and enhancing food security for vulnerable communities.
The Turnip Truck will celebrate its 25-year history and its forward-looking vision in May, with festivities in East Park, across the street from the Woodland Street store, where he cultivated memories of ugly tomatoes into a network of stores with deep roots in local food.
