Scoop: Davidson farm village with market, restaurants and homes opens next spring

• "If you go to Italy, you're not getting Sysco trucks driving up and down the coast to bring you all the food," Summit Coffee's owner Brian Helfrich says. "You're existing on what you're able to grow and harvest from the land. We're trying to channel that into a more intentional, slower way of doing life up in Davidson."
• Ingredients — from the tomatoes in your pizza sauce to the kale in your salad — will come from the crop fields that visitors can walk through.

Driving the news: Construction starts this month on infrastructure, trails and greenways. The first phase includes the working farm, called "The Garden," which will also grow flowers and herbs, as well as the first three buildings in a commercial center dubbed "The Village."

• A 6,800-square-foot multi-use building will be home to the "Greenhouse Market," housing the grocery store, deli, pizza restaurant, ice cream shop and a bookstore run by a separate, to-be-announced owner.
• Summit Coffee, a Davidson-born brand, will anchor the development with its 7,000-square-foot headquarters and roasting facility. Currently, operations are scattered between a Cornelius warehouse for roasting and executives in a co-working space.
• "We wanted a hub, basically a campus, that we can grow into for decades to come," Helfrich says.
• Silly Goose Bakeshop will open in a 3,000-square-foot retail space. The new brand will showcase Summit's bakery program.
• There will also be multiple outdoor gathering spaces and play areas.

Zoom in: Summit Farms is partnering with multiple homebuilders on a 50-acre residential section called "The Preserve." It will consist of 56 single-family homes, on sites ranging from 0.2 to 1.0 acres.

• Real estate agency Ivester Jackson is marketing the lots starting this spring, with construction beginning in the fall.
• Pricing has not been announced.

What they're saying: The slow-paced "agricultural community" reflects Summit's next chapter.

• Helfrich has grown Summit to 20 locations, with two opening this year outside Atlanta.
• He now says he wants to slow down and do "fewer things better," like being a good employer and a fixture of the community.
• "At some point, I had grand ambitions to scale Summit to the moon," he says. "It's hard to scale intimacy."
• He says it made sense for Summit to continue its evolution in the Lake Norman area, where it began its story in 1998 with its original cafe in downtown Davidson.

The big picture: Small farms are difficult to sustain in today's economy, with the vast majority of revenue going to large-scale, consolidated operations.

• That's why Helfrich says he's using a model that creates its own customer base: "You don't have to chase wholesale accounts or go to every farmer's market if it can exist in its own ecosystem."

What's next: Helfrich expects Summit Farms to eventually become a weekend getaway, with more than half of the acreage preserved as open space.

• The site is permitted for many other uses, which Helfrich may pursue in the future: a 40-bedroom boutique hotel, another restaurant, apartments, a brewery, a wedding and events business.

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