When Elio Silva quietly opened his State Road store the Tisbury Farm Market last fall with a limited stock of coffee, yucca and a few more low-cost products, he began expanding immediately — responding to customer requests to include gourmet and organic produce and substantially undercutting Island competitors in the process.

Meanwhile, down the road in a red barn currently housing a signless, nameless Brazilian store, he has added a large basement kitchen, hired several chefs and is buying in product for a new gourmet grocery and health food store.

Once the second store is fully up and running he expects to employ a staff of 40.

Doesn’t he know there’s a recession going on?

“This is the perfect business for a crisis,” said the 39-year-old merchant this week, sitting at a back table in Louis’ restaurant nearby his market. “People are always looking for the best deal.”

Mr. Silva’s two newest businesses are in a town with two supermarkets, including its largest high-end grocer, Cronig’s, and across the street from the Island’s biggest health food store, Healthy Additions, both of the latter owned by Steve Bernier.

If the size of the competition bothers him, Mr. Silva doesn’t show it.

“Stop & Shop is like a steamship and we’re like a 20-foot speedboat,” he said, grinning. “We can maneuver a lot easier.”

For one thing, the relatively small orders the Tisbury Farm Market takes are based on customer feedback, bolstered by a new online request form at tisburyfarmkmarket.com. When the store gets a dozen requests for an item in a week, Mr. Silva goes and buys it.

“It’s very hard to make a mistake,” he said. “When you buy what is actually going to sell, you’re buying stuff that’s already sold. Don’t have to spend money advertising, educating people. And one thing we do, we don’t carry all kinds of produce.”

The downside to the mail-order approach, he admits, is that he can’t stock everything.

“There’s some stuff, we can’t get it for a good price or there’s a large amount of spoilage, and our customers understand that,” he said. “Right now we don’t sell green beans. If you buy 30 pounds of green beans, you’re going to lose 13 pounds. Cronig’s and Stop & Shop, they will work with everything. They don’t care if they lose it because they just pass it on to the customer. With us it’s the other way around.”

Then, says Mr. Silva, he is able to outmaneuver the bulk-buying and big truck deliveries with small, sometimes single-item purchases from dozens of distributors.

“We see 70 different vendors throughout the week,” he said. “Most of the stores can’t do that. If you’re having stuff delivered, you can’t accommodate 70 delivery trucks. But we go to all these small businesses ourselves.”

Mr. Silva employees one full-time driver and two more on a part-time basis.

He buys direct from meatpackers in nearby states, an advantage he has over giants like Trader Joe’s, who have purchasing power, but buy meat from locations as far flung as Australia.

His driver goes to South Boston meat markets and to a produce market in Chelsea three times a week. In the summer it will be up to five times weekly. Buying from organic meat suppliers saves $1.80 on the pound, Mr. Silva said. He uses a broker on many items, to shave more off the price.

To illustrate the importance of being able to shop around, he pointed to Chobani Greek yogurt, an item he added to the stock based on customer requests.

“The first distributor we went to we had to sell it for $7.99 and we were like, ‘Okay, this doesn’t work,’” he said.” Using a second distributor it went down to $5.99, and this other guy was $3.99. It all depends who you buy it from, but we have to go through this one guy just for that yoghurt.”

He said he has to fight perceptions among sellers of the lavish spending habits of Vineyarders.

“I was at a food market last Thursday and I was talking to all these manufacturers. I say I’m from Tisbury, I don’t say Martha’s Vineyard, but even then some know and they go, ‘Oh you can charge a lot of money there.’ It’s the first thing everybody says. The image we’re trying to put out is we’re a gourmet outlet store. We’re not like a fancy store that only the rich people shop. And though some customers have a lot of money, they’re still looking for the best deal.”

Mr. Silva would like to go even more local with meat suppliers, he said, but so long as it is impossible for Island farms to get United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) certification, he can’t sell the meat.

“I can’t buy the chicken and sell it here . . . I could if I sold it as pet food,” he said, grinning again. “I have a friend of mine that does it in New York. He talked to the customers and said, ‘That’s the only way I can do it,’ and all his customers were more than willing to do it. I mean, I’m not sure how much the board of health would like me for that.”

A store has operated out of the red barn for almost a year catering mainly to the Brazilian market.

Though at various points in the conversation Mr. Silva says he is opening this weekend, first on Saturday then Sunday, he is happier to talk about a soft opening, during the month in April.

“It’s in the works, that’s how I’d put it,” he said.

Supplier delays and teething period administrative issues have pushed the date back, he said, and he wants everything ready before he publicizes the new version of the store.

One reason for his hesitancy is a perception issue which he says he has to approach carefully.

“My goal is to work with American people, and the two don’t mix,” he said, referring to his Brazilian customer base, “You’ve got to be very careful not to be labeled Brazilian. Once you are, you’re done as far as American business is concerned. The four or five Brazilian stores on the Island probably don’t have two per cent of their business from Americans.”

Greeting the shopper at the red barn today is a large wooden structure draped with chocolate eggs which is supposed to function as a Easter-themed photo booth for kids. In the future, Mr. Silva wants flowers in this spot, a trick he’ll borrow from Trader Joe’s, the chain store which Mr. Silva is using as a part-model for his business.

“That Easter bunny hut, it was like $2,000 just to build the thing,” he said, “the idea is to show abundance, because people want to feel that you’re prospering, that you’re investing in growing.”

In the first aisle you can buy some candy for under a dollar, choose from racks of CDs or buy an 18-carat gold wedding ring.

“I want to shy away from this kind of thing,” he said. “My wife will be angry because she likes this stuff, but it’s not with what I want to do.”

His wife, Fogaca Silva, previously ran the North Star, a Brazilian grocery at the triangle in Edgartown store, which they also own. She has scaled back involvmenet in the businesses while looking after their eight-month-old daughter Amanda, but comes in several times a week and is responsible for the Easter egg display, said Mr. Silva.

Mr. Silva said he plans to move the Edgartown store towards gourmet as well. The shift away from serving the Brazilian community is strictly a numbers game, said Mr. Silva. Over the past several years, he has tracked a steady decline in the Brazilian population.

“Two Brazilian stores closed already in the past three years on the Island — there’s just not enough business. The population has shrunk. We’ve been getting new Brazilians, but not from Brazil. They come from Florida, Jersey, Boston and stay a few years. It’s like with a spring: every year flows less water to you and eventually you’re going to have to look for another source.”

Hence, the new focus on locally produced food.

“We’re not there yet, but I have a very good feeling,” he said. “I know the ropes and I know I can put up a very good product for a very good price.”

Mr. Silva came to the Island as an 18-year-old, from Brazil where his father ran a supermarket where, he says, he was selling eggs from the age of eight.

He doesn’t do lunch and claims to have never taken a vacation.

“You’re always going to have people who succeed during a crisis,” he said, “and it doesn’t matter how bad the economy is, you’ve got to do something you like, and this is something I really like doing.”