How do Wegmans or Aldi end up in your neighborhood? Here's how supermarkets decide where to open stores on Long Island.

When Wegmans opened its 101,000-square-foot store in Lake Grove in February, it drew hundreds of people, some for the thrill and others to shop at Long Island's largest supermarket.

Located in the 28-acre DSW Plaza at Lake Grove shopping center at the corner of Middle Country and Moriches roads, the store is a traditional supermarket that has a high-end appeal, offering products from fresh-baked items to a self-service coffee station, made-to-order and premade salads and sandwiches and other delicacies.

For the Rochester-based chain, the 8½ acres of the Lake Grove shopping center that it bought in 2023 for $15.3 million was an opportunity to build a store in a prime spot on Long Island — a densely populated, high-income area, on a massive site.

“Our traditional suburban stores are large, between 80,000 and 120,000 square feet, requiring 15 to 20 acres of land to accommodate our store and adequate parking,” Wegmans spokeswoman Mandee Puleo said.

While the overall number of supermarkets on Long Island is declining, due in part to fewer traditional supermarkets and mom-and-pop stores, the variety of grocery stores is increasing as more specialty, discount and new-format players, such as Wegmans, expand in or enter the area — and competition has grown more fierce.

Some grocers are taking advantage of real estate vacancies created by the closings of traditional supermarkets on Long Island, a region where large, empty spaces are hard to come by, real estate and grocery experts said. 

"You’re not seeing that much from-the-ground-up building," said Wantagh native Jeff Metzger, founder and publisher emeritus of Food Trade News, a Columbia, Maryland-based publication. "Some of this development, particularly some of the closed Stop & Shop stores, are taken over by retailers who are coming in with a much-lighter expense load, knowing that the building is already available,” he said.

In Wegmans' case, the grocer demolished buildings in the Lake Grove shopping center to make space for its new store.

Grocers consider several factors when evaluating potential sites for supermarkets, including population density, household income, competition, ease of access to the sites, construction and rent costs, real estate experts said.

“Long Island is an attractive grocery market because it has strong population density and above-average household income,” said Roslyn native Scott Moses, a partner at Solomon Partners, a financial services company in Manhattan where he heads the grocery, pharmacy and restaurants investment banking group.

But grocers also consider how those factors might change over time, he said.

Supermarket closings, openings

In 2008, Long Island had its highest number of supermarkets and other grocery stores on record, 1,056, according to the New York State Department of Labor.

By 2024, the number had declined by 308, or 29%, to 748 stores, according to the newest data from the labor department.

But competition is more fierce now than ever, since not only is the variety among grocery stores growing on Long Island, but also profit margins in general are slim, about 1% to 2%, and the cost of doing business in New York is high, grocery experts said.

“Business is war. I mean, I don’t know how else to put it. … Everybody wants a piece of the pie,” said David Mandell, a third-generation grocer who owns six supermarkets on Long Island and in Queens.

Supermarket closings by King Kullen, Stop & Shop, Pathmark, Fairway Market, Waldbaum's and other traditional grocers — some chains no longer exist after bankruptcy filings — over the past decade have created real estate openings.

Some of those openings have been taken by new players, including Amazon Fresh and The Fresh Grocer, as well as specialty grocers already on Long Island that are expanding, such as Giunta’s Meat Farms and Uncle Giuseppe’s Marketplace. 

Discounters that have been on Long Island for years, such as Aldi, also are scooping up some of the space as they expand their footprints in the area, improving their stores’ appearance and food selections to attract more middle-class consumers seeking grocery bargains amid concerns about tariffs and inflation.

Like regions across the country, Long Island's grocery stores exist on a sort of "continuum," Jon Hauptman, founder of Price Dimensions, a Chicago-based pricing adviser for supermarket chains, wrote in an email. 

“One end is low-price/efficient stores, and the other end is high-service/quality/value-added stores," he said. "The new players often are found on one of the two ends of the continuum, while traditional grocers are in the 'murky middle,' which is more and more difficult to defend,” Hauptman said.

Long Island’s popular spots for grocery store development include Huntington, Westbury and Woodbury, partly because of the high incomes and availability of space, real estate experts said.

Some areas in Suffolk County, particularly eastern Suffolk, don't have the population density that grocery stores seek, said Brian Schuster, a vice chairman at Ripco Real Estate LLC in Woodbury who focuses on retail.

High-end grocers like Whole Foods and Uncle Giuseppe's focus primarily on the highest-income trade areas, which, on Long Island, are concentrated largely in Nassau and western Suffolk, he said.

“Once you get to Coram and points East, Middle Island, Ridge, all the way to Riverhead, the demographics are below the thresholds for most of the chain stores,” he said.

Last year, Quincy, Massachusetts-based grocer Stop & Shop closed 32 “underperforming” supermarkets in five states, including four stores on Long Island — in Coram, East Meadow, Greenvale and Hempstead.

Three of those four spaces are now spoken for by other retailers, but it is unclear if there has been any movement on the Coram location.

Stop & Shop in Coram Plaza, at 294 Middle Country Rd., was open for 20 years before the 66,194-square-foot store closed in November. The Town of Brookhaven has not received a building application for a new tenant to take that spot, town spokesman Drew Scott said.

Kite Realty Group, the Indianapolis-based owner of Coram Plaza, did not respond to a request for comment.

The other three former Stop & Shop spaces are either occupied or slated for occupancy.

In Greenvale's former Stop & Shop space, specialty Italian grocer Uncle Giuseppe’s will open a supermarket in the first quarter of 2026.

In Stop & Shop’s former Hempstead space, a Food Bazaar Supermarket opened in September 2024.

In August, Walmart submitted building plans to the Town of Hempstead seeking approval to expand its East Meadow store next door into Stop & Shop’s former space in order to create a supercenter. 

No foolproof formula

The grocery business has always been a tough industry but it’s the hardest it’s ever been now with the growth of online retail goliath Amazon, as well as third-party delivery companies, such as Instacart and DoorDash, which take a cut of supermarkets’ sales, Mandell said.

High incomes in a community don’t always guarantee success for a supermarket, he said.

Mandell succeeded and failed with expansions of his traditional supermarkets on Long Island, where he has three Holiday Farms stores and one Locust Valley Market.

In February 2022, he opened a 20,000-square-foot Holiday Farms supermarket in the high-end Woodbury Common shopping center, in a space that specialty grocer The Fresh Market had vacated in 2017 after 3½ years there.

In September 2002, he opened another store, a 20,000-square-foot Holiday Farms in Franklin Square, replacing a 48-year-old King Kullen supermarket. Holiday Farms was “better suited for the shopping habits in the area” than King Kullen, the landlord told Newsday at the time, adding, “Their lease was up and I felt it was time to make a change.”

The Holiday Farms in Woodbury closed after two years because of low sales, but the Franklin Square store is performing well, Mandell said, partly because of King Kullen’s long history in the shopping center, Franklin Plaza. People in the community are used to seeing a supermarket in that location, said Mandell, adding that his stores perform better in smaller spaces than King Kullen stores do.

Woodbury is a desirable place for grocers because of its high incomes, but that was part of the problem, he said.

“I think there were just too many good stores in the neighborhood. I think it was competing with Stop & Shop. I think it was competing with ShopRite. . … I was competing with Iavarone [Brothers] and Victoria’s Market and Gabby’s [Gourmet Bagelatessen],” he said.

The median household income in Woodbury is $181,667, compared with $143,144 in Nassau County and $126,863 in Suffolk County, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

'Competition doesn’t matter'

Headquartered in Germany, Aldi operates stores that are smaller than traditional supermarkets and carry a high percentage of the grocer's own private-label brands. The chain has more than 2,400 stores in the United States.

In February, Aldi said it planned to open a record 225 U.S. stores this year as part of its five-year growth strategy, which was announced in March 2024, to invest more than $9 billion to add 800 U.S. stores by the end of 2028.

One of Aldi’s top requirements for its store sites is that they must be around top retailers, including other grocery stores, because it helps bring foot traffic to its stores, said Chris Daniels, vice president of Aldi Inc.’s South Windsor Division, which includes eastern New York and most of New England.

“Competition doesn’t matter," Daniels said. "So, could it be a ShopRite? Could it be a super Walmart? Could it be a Stop & Shop? … We want to be around where there’s multiple retailers there,” said Daniels, adding that Aldi’s offering is unique enough to cushion it from competition from other grocers.

Aldi also considers ease of access to potential sites and the price-per-square-foot for rent when selecting new store locations, he said.

Of Aldi’s 18 stores on Long Island, 12 have opened in the past five years, including one that opened in June in a Medford space that was occupied by a Michaels arts and crafts store, which relocated. In August, Aldi opened a store in Bethpage, in most of the space vacated by an A.C. Moore Arts and Crafts store, and in Lake Ronkonkoma, in most of the space that was vacated in 2019 by a King Kullen.

Next summer, Aldi plans to open an approximately 21,000-square-foot store in Great Neck that will occupy about half of the space vacated in 2021 by a Best Market supermarket, which had opened in a former Waldbaum's space five years earlier.

Aldi has fared well on Long Island, where its average monthly store sales are higher than the chain’s national average, said Daniels, who declined to disclose specific numbers.

Part of Aldi’s growth nationwide has been fueled by an increase in middle-class customers seeking cheaper groceries amid concerns about tariffs and inflation, retail experts said.

The Aldi that opened in Medford in June was a welcome addition to the community, which has a wide range of incomes, Medford resident Marc Jagerman, 66, said Wednesday night while shopping for produce in the discount store.

“Why should I [throw] away my money? … I work too hard for it. And, so, coming here, being real about it, I get the same cucumbers” that would be in full-price stores, he said.

Jessica Brooks and her family were looking forward to the Medford store opening because it is down the street from their home, and closer than the Aldi in Selden, she said. The married mother of four children, ranging in age from 6 to 21, has a tight budget, so Aldi is her preferred grocery store, where she spends about $200 weekly.

“The prices are good. The quality is good. A lot of their off brands are actually, in some ways, better that the original brands,” said Brooks, 45, of Medford.