Executive Briefing
Maybe Whole Foods isn’t asleep at the wheel
New Erewhon-sized stores in New York sound smart. (Please, steal their cafés, too.)
By Dan Frommer on Saturday, March 9, 2024 at 8:00 am
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Amazon’s stewardship of Whole Foods Market has been largely uninspiring, after buying the grocery chain for $14 billion in 2017. Yes, it’s still the best large, high-end grocery chain in the US. And, yes, it had a heck of a distraction for a few years there with the pandemic. But its rate of innovation, offline and online, has felt low for a while.
So it’s nice to see some creative energy, such as its reveal this week that it’s going to be opening a handful of new, smaller-format stores, starting in New York City, called Whole Foods Market Daily Shop.
These stores will be roughly around a quarter of the size of an average Whole Foods — closer to the size of an Erewhon in LA, or a little smaller than a Trader Joe’s — and won’t have a hot bar. But they will feature grab-and-go prepared foods, a curated selection of groceries, and what sounds like a new take on one of its in-store coffee shops.
Great! While New York is home to some of the world’s best Whole Foods locations, there’s a clear space in the market for more.
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