HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — The Wild Ramp, a new grocery store that opened in West Virginia July 9, is retailing local and regional products from farmers within a 250-mile radius of Huntington.

“We are interested in anything that is an agricultural product,” said Gail Patton, a board member at The Wild Ramp. “If it comes from the farm, we’re interested in it.”

For the fall retail season, the store will be looking for decorative crops produced in the region. “We definitely want pumpkins, we definitely want fall ornamentals,” said Patton.

Producers must pay a $50 membership fee to sell products at the Wild Ramp; they then receive 90 percent of the sale price. The store, open Wednesdays-Saturdays, is located in The Shops at Heritage Station, on 11th Street in Huntington. Guidelines for producers are listed at the store’s website, http://wildramp.org

Local small farmers have already felt the effects of an expanded market for their products. “Some producers have planted fall crops, like lettuce, beets and parsnips, due to the opening of the market,” said Patton.

More than 30 farmers are registered as food vendors. In August, the store sourced farm products as far away as Athens, Ohio, about 75 miles from Huntington. The store will also sell juried craft items.

Dominique Wong, a member of the grocery’s nine-member board and co-owner of Yellow Goat Farm in nearby Proctorville, Ohio, said her farm has already experienced a positive effect from the store.

“We have definitely sold more in one month at the Wild Ramp than we have sold in a month on our own,” said Wong, who supplies goat milk soaps to the store. “Our profits were larger because we didn’t have to factor our time sitting at a market or meeting someone to get them their products.”

Organized as a nonprofit, the Wild Ramp plans to minimize costs by using donated labor and other resources. More than 2,000 volunteer hours were logged while organizing and opening the store, said board members. Local sources contributed more than $40,000 in cash and equipment donations, as well as some small loans, to open the store.

Patton said the store, named after the early spring vegetable traditionally harvested in Appalachia, is the result of efforts to develop more markets for local producers and more access to food grown locally. “We are not something new and different than farmers’ markets,” she said. “We’re just something with more options that is open year-round.”

The Wild Ramp started as an idea generated by three students completing a senior sociology project at Huntington’s Marshall University. They brought the idea to Patton, who liked its local economic development angle.

The university community has been vital to the project, she said, and the original three students volunteer in the store’s operations. “The university students are very interested in anything that has to do with sustainability,” she said.

The students have also encouraged the group to target a wide swath of potential consumers. “The college kids want to be sure that we’re not doing this just for the hoity-toity and snooty people,” she said. “We want to be able to make this good, healthy food available to anybody and everybody.”

The Wild Ramp is in the process of being able to accept SNAP, or food stamp, payments. Patton said the store will be able to accept WIC and Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Payments in the future.

Huntington gained national attention when it became the first filming location for celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s “Food Revolution” reality television program in 2010. The city is also the topic of a forthcoming book that examines whether the area has been able to improve public health and eating habits since the program’s presence.

The co-authors of the book are the husband-wife team of food writer Jane Black and journalist Brent Cunningham, managing editor of the Columbia Journalism review and a native of Charleston, W.Va. The writers lived in Huntington for six months to research their book, and one of Black’s food columns for The Washington Post helped steer the development of the Wild Ramp, said Patton.

That column reported on the Local Roots grocery in Wooster, Ohio. The Wild Ramp has been patterned after the Wooster store model, explained Patton, who is also director of Unlimited Future, a Huntington economic development organization.