Whole Foods Mini-Market on Upper East Side is a Hit

By: Hadassa Kalatizadeh

Whole Foods Market’s new concept of smaller stores seems to be a hit. As reported by the NY Post, the upscale Amazon-owned grocery chain, has been working to expand into crowded urban areas with mini-mart style stores that are just a fraction of its full-size supermarkets. New York City was a key testing ground for the mini market store concept, at which customers can quickly visit to buy just a few items. Its first “Daily Shop” opened at 1175 Third Avenue in the Lenox Hill section of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

A Whole Foods spokesperson told The Post that the Daily Shop will provide “a convenient option for grab-and-go meals and snacks, weekly essentials, and a quick, easy destination to pick up ingredients to complete a meal – with all items meeting the company’s rigorous quality standards.” The grocery chain, headquartered in Austin, Texas, is famed for selling USDA Certified Organic products and nothing with hydrogenated fats and artificial colors, flavors, or preservatives.

The Daily Shop, which had its grand opening in Manhattan in September, has since brought in higher-than-projected sales figures, Whole Foods execs told the Wall Street Journal. The store is just 9,100-square-feet, or roughly one quarter the size of its regular stores. The grocery chain has planned four other mini stores for Manhattan, including locations set to open in Hell’s Kitchen, the East Village and the StuyTown development. The opening dates for these stores have not yet been announced. The company’s next step will be to replicate the success of the mini stores in Washington, DC, where a Daily Shop is slated to open in mid-2025, a Whole Foods spokesperson told the WSJ.

Residents close to the opened Daily Shop said they were excited about the concept. “The idea of having a store down the block where you could go and get produce [was appealing],” Arthur Glauberman, a 72-year-old who lives less than a block away from the new Upper East Side store, told the WSJ. “I was thrilled that they opened.”

Whole Foods, which was purchased by Amazon in 2017 for $13.7 billion, boasts about 500 locations across the country, as well as seven stores in the United Kingdom. Per the Post, it isn’t the only big retailer looking to open up smaller stores. Walmart, Publix and Sprouts Farmers Market have all similarly opened up “neighborhood markets” in select cities.

Walmart, which is ranked the largest retailer in the United States and which has stores in some 24 countries, recently announced that it would open two mini mart version stores— one in the Dune Lakes region of Santa Rosa Beach, Fla., and the other in the Vine City section of Atlanta, GA, the Post reported. Albeit, the stores will be some 17,000 square feet bigger than the original mini-marts. Walmart was probably the first giant retailer to try to smaller versions, opening its first three neighborhood market stores in Arkansas back in 1998.

Per the Post, Publix, the supermarket chain which operates a whopping 1,440 stores primarily in the southeastern US, opened up seven ‘GreenWise Market’ locations in Florida, with smaller formats. Publix has plans to expand this concept. Trader Joe’s also opened a small-format store in March. The 2,800-square-foot ‘Trader Joe’s Pronto’ is located in the Union Square section of Manhattan.