The Fresh Grocer enters New York State, with opening of first store on Long Island

Another grocer is entering the increasingly competitive supermarket fray on Long Island.

On Friday, The Fresh Grocer opened its first Long Island store — and its first in New York State — in Oakdale, at 885 Montauk Hwy. in the Lighthouse Commons shopping center.

The full-service grocery store is owned by K. Thompson Foods, a family-owned company that also owns three ShopRite supermarkets on Long Island — in Deer Park, Riverhead and Uniondale.

“We backed into The Fresh Grocer because we found this location in Oakdale. And we liked it. And we saw the need for a grocery store in this area,” said Ken Thompson, vice president and chief operating officer of K. Thompson Foods.

There are 21 other Fresh Grocer stores, in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

The new 26,000-square-foot store in Oakdale has gourmet items, Italian specialty products, international cheeses, a hot-food bar, and full-service bakery, butcher, seafood and deli departments.

The store employs about 120 people, Thompson said.

‘More flexibility’

Both of the registered trademarks for The Fresh Grocer and ShopRite are owned by Wakefern Food Corp., a Keasbey, New Jersey-based cooperative with nearly 50 member companies that independently own and operate 365 supermarkets in eight Northeast states. Most of the stores, 312, are ShopRites, while the remaining are among six other banners, including Price Rite Marketplace, Fairway Market and Gourmet Garage.

The Fresh Grocer and ShopRite are the only Wakefern banners on Long Island.

The Fresh Grocer supermarkets typically are smaller than ShopRites and they focus on fresh offerings on the perimeter of the stores, Wakefern spokeswoman Karen O’Shea said.

ShopRites range in size from 60,000 to 100,000 square feet, she said.

Finding suitable retail space as far south as Oakdale is challenging, so the availability in the Lighthouse Commons shopping center was a better fit for The Fresh Grocer than ShopRite, Thompson said.

The Fresh Grocer has a strong focus on fresh perishables and grab-and-go items, carries fewer products than ShopRite and leans toward the higher-end market, said Jeff Metzger, publisher of Food Trade News in Columbia, Maryland, and a Wantagh native.

Wakefern acquired The Fresh Grocer brand in 2013, when it was a Philadelphia chain with eight stores — six in Philadelphia, one in Wilmington, Delaware, and one in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The Philadelphia store became a ShopRite.

“The idea behind The Fresh Grocer [brand acquisition] was to expand the presence of Wakefern, giving it more flexibility, more versatility, as they continue to grow or attempt to add new [co-op] members and new stores,” Metzger said.

Another Fresh Grocer store in the New York metro area will open in 2025, in Brooklyn, but that store will not be owned by K. Thompson Foods, O’Shea said.

Grocery battles

Grocery store competition on Long Island has been growing for the past several years as new players enter the market, and traditional chains shrink.

Long Island’s first Wegmans supermarket is slated to open in Lake Grove in the first quarter of 2025, the Rochester-based chain said.

German discount grocer Aldi, which has 13 Long Island stores, including four that opened in the past two years, plans to open five more on the Island by fall 2025.

High-end grocer Whole Foods, which opened its seventh Long Island store in Huntington Station in July, also plans to open a store in 2025 at the former Sun Vet Mall, which was renamed The Shops at SunVet last year, as part of the Holbrook property’s redevelopment as an open-air shopping center.

Meanwhile, Stop & Shop, which has the largest grocery market share on Long Island, announced in July that it would close 32 “underperforming” supermarkets in five states, including four stores on Long Island, by Nov. 2. The Quincy, Massachusetts-based chain, which is owned by Dutch company Ahold Delhaize, will have 46 Stop & Shop stores on Long Island after the closings. 

For Thompson, however, not only is fierce grocery competition on Long Island not new to him, but he welcomes it.

“It’s been that way as long as I’ve been in the business,” said Thompson, a second-generation grocer who has been in the supermarket business more than 40 years.

A bigger challenge than the growing grocery competition is finding enough staff, particularly as Thompson’s stores offer higher-level goods and services, such as ready-to-eat meals, he said.

“We’re battling for customers and also employees now,” he said.

Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.