45th Anniversary - 1976-2021

45 Years

Its good to celebrate milestones.  Birthdays, anniversaries, graduations – all events we should celebrate.

It seems like just the other day we celebrated 40 years in business and now here we are at 45 years since Neal Peters started this business.  Early 1976 Neal got a tip that one of the Dutch Stores on Grandville Ave was for sale.  The owners wanted to retire.  He jumped at the opportunity and by April he was the new owner of Van’s Dutch Store.  Full speed ahead he worked tirelessly making little changes within the store, building the inventory, developing the mail order side of the business.  We have a small spiral notebook with a handful of names the former owner recorded of the mail order customers.  There are a few names in the booklet that are still customers 45 years later.   We created an amazingly simple list of items customers could order and handwrote the bills which went in the box.  Customers would send a check once they got their order. 

Fast forward 45 years and you are reading this on a Blog located on a website!  Celebrations have been postponed or reduced to minimum participation this past year, but we still hold an anniversary sale every April.  The planning starts in January and this year despite all that planning it has been challenging.  Challenging to get merchandise in on time to match the sale dates and mailing of flyers.  The sale usually happens in the month of April, but we moved the dates out a little to allow extra time for containers to arrive.  With some exceptions (cheese) most of the shipments arrived and we appreciate all the orders that have been placed so far.

It is our custom to have some type of free gift with purchase in April for our mail order customers.  This year it was decided to give away a free copy of Dutch The Magazine published by Mokeham Publishing.  We are a huge fan of this magazine and look forward to its arrival.  Mokeham is a small publisher in Canada and has readers in Canada and the US.  As part of the free magazine there is a special offer:  a buy one get one free deal that is too good to pass up.   You can subscribe and order a second subscription for a friend or relative for free.  I can tell you being a small publisher today has its challenges, but I believe you will enjoy the free copy very much and hope you will take advantage of this unique offer. 

We have been extremely encouraged by the continued support as well as all the new customers we have been privileged to serve this past year.

Thank you very much,

The Peters Family