Walmart wants to expand another Long Island store into supercenter

The world’s largest grocery retailer is again pushing for a bigger share of food sales on Long Island, where it plans to enlarge another store into a supercenter with a grocery store.

Walmart wants to turn its Riverhead store into a supercenter that will include a new full-service supermarket and dedicated online pickup section, the retailer’s representatives told Riverhead Planning Department staff at a meeting at town hall Tuesday morning.

Walmart’s Riverhead store, at 1890 Old Country Rd. in Gateway Plaza, opened in 2014. That store was a relocation of a smaller store that opened in 2001 on Old Country Road.

"With the potential to expand our existing Riverhead Walmart store into a supercenter, we are excited about the opportunity to bring expanded grocery offerings, services, and new career opportunities to the community," Bentonville, Arkansas-based Walmart said in a statement Tuesday.

The Riverhead plans follow Walmart's previous moves to turn some of its existing Long Island stores, including those in East Meadow and Islandia, into supercenters, as the retailer seeks a bigger share of consumers' grocery spending in the region. 

During the Tuesday meeting, called a “pre-submission conference,” Walmart’s attorney, engineer and director of public affairs met with Riverhead’s planning department staff, who gave feedback on the parking, landscaping and building changes proposed for the Riverhead store, and discussed sewer and health department requirements.

The Riverhead store is 167,951 square feet. The changes would expand the store by 7% to about 180,000 square feet, Alek Kociski, an associate in the Melville office of Bohler Engineering, told the planning department.

Walmart will use the feedback from the planning department staff to revise its expansion plan before submitting an official site plan application to the town for approval.

“They will likely make some revisions and come in for another pre-submission meeting prior to the formal submission of a site plan application,” Greg Bergman, a senior planner in Riverhead, said in an email Tuesday afternoon.

First launched by Walmart in 1988, supercenters are set up to be one-stop shopping destinations that include full-service supermarkets, clothes, home furnishings and electronics, as well as specialty shops, such as nail and hair salons, and fast-food restaurants.

The average size of a Walmart supercenter is 178,000 square feet, while the average size of a regular Walmart discount store is 105,000 square feet, according to the retailer's annual report published in March.

Betting on groceries

Walmart Inc. has 14 stores on Long Island, including a Sam’s Club in Medford; a Neighborhood Market, which is a grocery store, in Levittown; and three supercenters.

Supercenters are Walmart’s preferred store format, partly because groceries are the biggest contributor to profits. Groceries accounted for nearly 60% of Walmart’s $462.4 billion in total U.S. net sales in its fiscal year 2025.

Among Walmart's 5,207 U.S. stores, 68% are supercenters and 7% are regular discount stores.

While Walmart is the largest grocery retailer in the nation — and world — it ranks seventh on Long Island, where it has 5.7% of the market share among all types of grocery sellers, including convenience stores and drugstores, according to Food Trade News, a Columbia, Maryland-based trade publication. 

Quincy, Massachusetts-based Stop & Shop's 46 supermarkets on Long Island account for the largest market share, 16.6%.

For more than a decade, Walmart has been enlarging or seeking to enlarge some of its Long Island stores into supercenters.

Two other Walmart stores on Long Island — one opened in East Meadow in 2002 and the other opened in Islandia in 2003 — are on track to become supercenters. The expansion plans Walmart submitted to local government agencies last year are going through the approval process, but the Islandia project received site plan approval from the village in January.

Walmart’s Valley Stream store, which opened in 2003, was expanded by 41% to 169,000 square feet in 2014 to become the retailer’s first supercenter on Long Island.

In 2020, Walmart expanded its then-13-year-old Farmingdale store by 40% to create a 205,000-square-foot supercenter.

The retailer did open a completely new 197,000-square-foot supercenter in a new retail and residential development called The Boulevard in Yaphank in 2021.

By Tory N. Parrish

tory.parrish@newsday.comToryParrish1

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.