Jennifer Blackwood still remembers the old gas station in Seaside, Florida, from her pharmaceutical sales days in the Panhandle. “It had a lot of personality,” she says. So when she first saw Battles Wharf Market — the rambling, beloved market on Scenic 98 just north of the Grand Hotel — she recognized the species immediately. A place with character that couldn’t be built from scratch.
In February 2025, she became its owner.
From Winn-Dixie to the C-Suite of Small Business
Blackwood’s route to the market ran through Mobile, where she was born, and through a childhood spent on Weeks Bay, where her grandmother lived her whole life. Summers on the bay made the decision early: Fairhope was where she wanted to raise her own family. She attended Theodore High School and the University of Alabama, working three jobs — including a cashier’s register at Winn-Dixie, which awarded her a grocery-company scholarship toward a hospital administration degree.
Her first career took her into hospitals — installing computer systems in small and medium hospitals across the country, three to six weeks at a time, learning every department in the building. She decided she preferred the clinical side and the patients, rerouted into pharmaceutical sales, and spent twenty-five years there with some of the largest companies in the industry. She is a single mother of twin daughters, Grace and Denice, and credits her own single mother for the work ethic that carries both careers.
The Accident That Changed Everything
The pivot to Fairhope came through a string of contingencies. After a COVID-era layoff, she was working at a local bar and restaurant and thinking about buying a restaurant on the Eastern Shore. Then she met Meyer Robinson, her fiancé — and on a wet road, his truck hydroplaned. Blackwood broke her neck, her shoulder, her sternum. “I’m lucky to be alive,” she says. “This accident made me want to change everything. It was an intervention.”
She recovered. She and Robinson will marry in September. And when a friend mentioned that Ken Buck was looking to sell Battles Wharf Market, she moved fast — meeting with Buck, shadowing him daily, learning the operation from the inside, and closing the purchase on February 1, 2025. “This just fell in my lap,” she says. “I love when things work out like this!”
Don’t Fix What Isn’t Broken
Her operating philosophy at the market is continuity first. The same cooks, the same recipes that customers love, the daily specials that sell out every day — and the hot dogs and sausage dogs that remain, in her words, the history of the market’s success. She has tweaked a few of the Buck family’s recipes; a small change to the hot roast beef po’ boy turned it into a bestseller, and a Cuban sandwich on the specials board sold out fast. Regulars will testify to the chicken salad, and the wine selection — she calls it the best on Scenic 98 — runs from Portugal’s Vinho Verde on up.
At 3 p.m. on an ordinary Thursday, the stream of customers tells the rest of the story: kids on scooters, boaters fresh off the water, construction crews, and Point Clear ladies on a circuit as predictable as the tide. The market at 18327 Scenic Highway 98 functions as the neighborhood’s living room — the kind of stop where the owner works the register, the kitchen, and the ordering, because “I believe that you never ask an employee to do something that you would not do yourself.”
What’s Coming
Blackwood’s plans are additive, not disruptive: dinners to go and take-and-bake items for the summer families along the bay, catering for her neighbor to the south in Little Point Clear, Fairhope-centric merchandise for Grand Hotel vacationers, a new awning, and something retro and cool for the antique gas pumps out front. A mural on the building’s north side will trace the history of Battles Wharf itself — a community that took its name from the Civil War skirmish fought on its shoreline.
She is also planning to give back — sponsoring local teams and leagues and supporting charitable causes across the region — and to hold a proper grand opening once every detail is done. “I’m taking everything slowly,” she says. Regulars, meanwhile, have already voted: they keep coming, at all hours, for the same recipes the Buck family built and the new owner has sworn to protect.