Convenience With Style: The Rise and Rise of French Market Express

Some of my fondest food memories take place in gas stations. As a kid, early morning drives with my dad meant cellophane-wrapped sausage biscuits from Harkins Handy Stop. While my wife and I were courting, road trips to her hometown of Abbeville introduced me to cracklins, boudin kolaches, and the pure joy of eating something absurdly delicious off of the trunk of my car. 

While southwestern Louisiana does gas station food better than any other place in America, northern Louisiana has its share of outstanding c-store eats. Tumanella’s perfect chicken strips on Cooper Road, steak nights at Longwood General Store, and guisado tacos at Taqueria la Reyna del Sur, located inside of a Bossier City Valero station, are some of my favorites.

Even amid such a roadside cornucopia, there’s an acknowledged heavyweight champion when it comes to convenience store dining in northern Louisiana: French Market Express. Situated a stone’s throw off Exit 138 in Natchitoches, French Market Express is the brainchild of Linda Henderson, who owns and operates the store with her genial husband of 50 years, Earl. Their son, Troy, manages the store, and other family members help out.

Linda and Earl became partners in the gas station that would become French Market Express in 1996. The Hendersons previously owned and operated a small convenience store in Zwolle. Earl, a successful pharmacist, had purchased a struggling Shell station there and turned it over to Linda to manage.

“Why he would do that, I have no idea,” Linda said. “I’d only ever taken one business class, and that was typing.”

Round-Up Grocery “practically ran itself,” but Linda saw potential for improvement everywhere she looked.

“I told Earl: ‘Earl, you know, everyone comes in and buys chips and cokes at lunchtime. Why can’t we put some hot food in?” 

Customer response to the hot lunch counter—a rarity among convenience stores 40 years ago—was overwhelmingly positive. Linda began to rethink much of the conventional wisdom of the convenience store industry.  

“With convenience stores, the general philosophy has always been ‘gas purchases outside drive sales inside,’ but I think of it in the exact opposite way,” Linda said.

In the early 1990s, Linda and Earl’s transformation of Round-Up Grocery captured the attention of a business associate who owned an under-performing convenience store in Natchitoches. To make a long story short, Linda and Earl became partners in the store at 5109 University Parkway, eventually purchasing it outright. Shortly after being handed the keys, the Hendersons learned that a brand new Racetrac filling station would be opening next door. They needed to breathe new life into the station, and they needed to do it quickly. 

Linda’s initial strategy focused on groceries. There were few options for groceries on the west side of town, but customers didn’t respond as she and Earl had hoped.

“We came very, very close to not making it,” Linda said, sharing some grim financial info from their leanest months. “It was tough back then.”

The strategy that she ultimately settled on is, sincerely, one of the smartest things that I have heard in a decade of interviewing food entrepreneurs.

“I decided to design a convenience store for women,” Linda said.

She wanted to create a clean, welcoming store that stocked Louisiana gifts, offered restaurant-quality hot food, and felt less like a gas station than a boutique and lunch rendezvous that happened to have gas pumps out front. There would be a food court where customers could sit down to eat. There’d even be a wine store carrying better wines than those stocked by local grocers and liquor stores. She called the concept French Market Express.

Early architectural renderings didn’t reflect Linda’s vision. One version, for example, had a front porch lined with rocking chairs.

“I think that version was just copying Cracker Barrel, to be quite honest,” Linda said. 

One afternoon, while Earl was watching college football, Linda sat down at the dining room table with a pile of crafting supplies and did something that she had absolutely no training or experience doing: She built a 3D model of French Market Express using cardboard, paper and glue. When she showed it to a local draftsman, they laughed and referred to it as “paper dolls.” She took her business elsewhere. 

“Being a woman, and especially a blonde woman, people occasionally don’t take me seriously,” Linda said. “Which is okay with me. It gives me an advantage when people underestimate me.” 

Linda’s gut told her that French Market Express would need more than a catchy name and an unusual floor plan in order to succeed. It would need a signature food item, something unique to their store that competitors could not easily imitate. Linda never had any doubt what that food item would be.

“I said ‘I’m gonna have a cake that makes this place famous. I’m gonna call it the Louisiana Yam Cake, and this cake is going to make its mark.”

The yam cake recipe that is served at French Market Express originated in Linda’s hometown of Elton, Louisiana, in the kitchen of her aunt, Audrey Garbarino. According to Linda’s father, Audrey’s yam cake recipe took home the top prize in a local recipe competition in the 1930s and generated quite a stir. Akin to a carrot cake, the rich, indulgent cake is filled with shredded coconut, pecans and mashed yams.

Linda tinkered with the recipe for months, until she found a balance between Aunt Audrey’s brilliant recipe—made with “a pinch of this and a teaspoon of that”—and something that she felt could be reproduced consistently in a commercial bakery.

The cake became an overnight sensation, as Linda knew it would.

“People would come in and say ‘Someone told me that I had to come here for a cake,’” Linda said. “We’d let people sample the little mini-cakes, and they’d put it in their mouth and then just look me right in the eyes and say ‘Oh, my God.’”

Baked goods have become such a large part of the business that the Hendersons have added a sprawling second building that houses a bakery, stock room and offices.

“Right now, we’re averaging between $4,500 and $6,500 in food sales every day. That’s a higher average than the majority of restaurants,” she said. “The average c-store’s indoor purchase today is around $4.65. Our average indoor purchase is over $10, and we see upwards of 2,000 indoor customers per day.”

In addition to the Louisiana Yam Cake, there are lots of other good things to eat and drink at French Market Express. The meat pies are exemplary, the po’ boys are among the best in town, and Linda’s made-from-scratch gingerbread men are out of this world. But giving all of the credit for the store’s success to the quality of its food would short-change the beating heart of the place.

As Linda and Earl escorted me to my car following our conversation, we took a quick tour of the busy bakery, crossed the sunny parking lot, and wound our way through the bustling bowels of the convenience store. At one point, Linda paused briefly to point out a futuristic-looking apparatus hulking in one corner of a storage room.

“That’s our reverse-osmosis water system,” Linda said, barely breaking her stride. “It makes the fountain drinks taste better.”

It took an outstanding business mind to envision a convenience store for women, develop a Southern Living-ready signature dessert, and build a convenience store with a brand so strong that it regularly sells more food than the Popeye’s next door. But installing a reverse-osmosis water system in order to make a ninety-nine cent Dr. Pepper taste marginally better? That, to me, doesn’t read as business acumen so much as it reads like the simple, increasingly rare act of giving a damn about other people.

People work hard for their dollars, and those dollars don’t stretch like they used to. We deserve better places to pull off of the interstate, stretch our legs, and grab a bite to eat. As anyone who drives Interstate 49 regularly will tell you, many of the convenience stores clustered around the small-town exits there have pretty much descended into a weird squalor of phony boner pills, filthy restrooms, and crusty Hunt Brothers pizzas slowly withering beneath flickering heat lamps.

At this point, I’d rather run out of gas and walk to Natchitoches than pull off of the interstate at the Alexandria or Ville Platte exits. It’s a sorry state of affairs that is not doing Louisiana tourism any favors. 

Linda had intended to see me to my car, but on our short walk from the rear of the store to the front door, she saw a half-dozen things that needed to be addressed immediately. Having become acquainted with her approach to business, I expected nothing less.

Earlier, I’d asked her and Earl a vague, poorly-worded question: Why do this? Why, you know, put so much thought and effort into a gas station?

“Anything that I do, you know, I just give it my all,” Linda said. “I really try.”

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