This week, Whole Foods Market announced plans to open small format stores called Daily Shop, in an effort to offer urban customers a convenient shopping experience. Its first location will be on New York City’s Upper East Side, and four others will follow in the city.
The stores will range from 7,000 to 14,000 square feet (about the size of a typical Trader Joe’s store) compared to its typical 40,000 square feet, with a curated offering of fresh and packaged foods.
Christina Minardi, executive vice president of growth and development for Whole Foods Market and Amazon, told Retail Brew she oversees Whole Foods’ evolution and growth team, which is tasked with developing innovative new retail concepts.
“We’ve been talking about this for a while, and the time is now because we really feel that convenience is something that our customers really want,” Minardi said.
The first Daily Shop will be located in the middle of a 30-block gap between two full-sized Whole Foods locations in the Upper East Side, and Minardi said she believes the concept will win over urban customers who live too far from a Whole Foods to shop there regularly.
The stores will have a pared down product selection. Rather than a full-service meat department, for example, they’ll have meat cut and packaged off-site. Daily Shop will also feature Amazon One palm payment at checkout, she said.
Whole Foods hired a retail design firm based in Italy, with a partner firm in Switzerland, to design Daily Shop, so the stores’ design will be “a little bit more on the European side,” with shelves of food “everywhere you turn”—and no blank walls, Minardi told us.
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“We’re always constantly looking and learning from other stores, and not just food stores, all retailers,” she said. “I could go to a Crate & Barrel and just love the way they set up their POS system.”
The build-out for Daily Shop takes just 10 weeks, compared to 10 to 12 months for a typical store, Minardi said, so Whole Foods hopes to have a second Daily Shop opened by year’s end. The grocer, which also has 70 new full-sized stores in development, will then begin to explore other cities for Daily Shop.
No small feat: It’s not the grocer’s first foray into small format stores. In 2016, Whole Foods opened its first 365 by Whole Foods Market concept, offering some lower-priced items in a convenient format, before shuttering the 12 stores it opened starting in 2019. Minardi said the company did “a deep dive” on what did and didn’t work with those stores.
“That’s the great thing about having a parent company like Amazon; they really helped us with our pricing these last several years,” she said. “We’re really competitive in the market, especially in New York City.”
Minardi also oversees a hybrid team working on real estate, store development, and design for Amazon Go and Fresh stores, many of which have been revamped with new products, lower prices, and an updated checkout experience, while others have closed.
“Whether you want to shop a Fresh store, a Whole Foods Market, a Go, or a Daily Shop, we’re gonna win in the grocery business and that’s really what we’re all focused on,” Minardi said.