LEBANON — Emily Roush is all too familiar with the struggles facing rural grocery stores.
Emily, an Iola native, and husband Kaden have stressed creativity and flexibility in keeping their own small grocery afloat in a community of 180 in rural Smith County.
It’s why customers hungry for high-quality, locally produced meat, (and now a wide selection of gluten-free products) will travel from miles around to Main Street Mercantile, which aside from a local co-op station, is Lebanon’s sole business.
The Roushes also have taken a novel approach to other issues most folks don’t think about, such as ensuring grocery orders are large enough to keep suppliers happy, but not too large for such a small population base.
Others have taken notice.
In May, the Roushes were named the 2026 Rural Grocers of the Year at the National Rural Grocery Summit in Fargo, N.D.
“It was definitely something we weren’t expecting,” Roush told the Register in a telephone interview. “It’s always awesome to be recognized for what we’re doing, and it gives us a good stage to be able to bring more attention to rural groceries in general.”
Roush is the daughter of Iolans Nathan and Cindy Clark. She graduated from Iola High School in 2011, attended school for a year at Allen Community College, and then transferred to Kansas State University, where she earned a degree in agronomy. It was while attending Allen she met Kaden, who was on the school’s livestock judging team. As fate would have it, Kaden also transferred to K-State, earning a degree in agricultural business.
The couple were married in 2015, when they relocated to Kaden’s native Smith County — a stone’s throw from Nebraska, and about 70 miles north of Salina and Hays, the closest population centers. (The region’s biggest claim to fame is it’s home to the geographic center of the contiguous United States.)
And while Kaden’s family had raised pigs on their farm, but not on a commercial scale, the experience was enough to entice him to pursue raising pigs for a living.
The Roushes found their niche, raising Berkshires, known for their higher quality of meat. They became a local go-to source, particularly at farmers markets, and for other direct-to-consumer sales.
They began a modest shipping operation, investing in such essentials as a dry-ice supplier, insulated boxes, “and a really nice website,” Roush noted.
For a while, the Roushes worried they’d bitten off more than they could chew.
“The orders weren’t really coming like we’d hoped,” she recalled. “We were in a pretty saturated market.”
But fate intervened in 2020, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, where suppliers were forced to close their shops and lockers, and focus exclusively on shipping.
“It turns out we were about five steps ahead of everybody else,” Roush said. “We had our processing spaces, we had the meat, and we had a way to get it to people.”
