At the cavernous grocery store about to open in Pelham Manor, head baker Angelo Villareale, who learned his trade 30 years ago in his father”™s Brooklyn bakeries, broke in a new $24,000 oven with batch after batch of aromatic bagels. Across from the bakery counter, workers unpacked boxes of dried fruits and stocked newly erected shelves. A former New York City graffiti artist on a high mobile scaffold applied his street skills with spray paint to a produce department wall, shaping free-hand gargantuan fruits and vegetables.
Below him, Howard and Daniel Glickberg, the father-and-son team running one of New York”™s best-known and most profitable food markets, watched approvingly.
It”™s the 6,000-square-foot produce section that greets shoppers entering Westchester”™s first Fairway Market, the new anchor tenant in former Kmart space at the newly renovated Post Road Plaza Shopping Center, where New Jersey-based Levin Management Corp. this spring is wrapping up a $10 million repositioning. Fairway trucks in produce from California seven days a week, and 90 percent of it is bought without a middleman. “We do more volume in our produce department than most town supermarkets do in their whole store,” said Fairway Market CEO Howard Glickberg.
Produce is where the family business began. Glickberg”™s grandfather, Russian immigrant Nathan Glickberg, opened a produce and vegetable stand in Manhattan at Broadway and West 74th Street, where the flagship Fairway store is an ever-crowded stop for Upper West Side residents, city tourists and shopping day trippers from the suburbs. “It”™s either 75, 76 or 77 years ago,” Glickberg said during a tour of the new Westchester market. “We”™re not 100 percent sure, so we”™re celebrating our 75th anniversary for three years.”
The CEO joined his father, Leo, in the business in 1974. “It originally was kind of a produce store,” he said. “We started to go a little more upscale. Produce was still the backbone of the business. It still is.”
The 75,000-foot-store in Pelham Manor, the largest in the companyӪs growing metropolitan chain, is not his grandfatherӪs or his fatherӪs Fairway. It includes a 60-seat caf̩; 20,000 square feet of backroom storage; a design-your-own burrito deli section and a hot bar; more than 600 varieties of cheese, including hand-pulled mozzarella made at the counter; a roaster on the premises that will process 2,000 pounds of coffee daily; more than 90 varieties of imported and domestic olive oil, bottled and store-labeled at FairwayӪs central facility in Harlem, and an anticipated monthly electric bill of $100,000.
In a 6,500-square-foot space next door, the company is opening its first Fairway Wine & Spirits, stocked with about 2,200 domestic and imported wines and more than 200 varieties of liquor.
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Glickberg said the Pelham Manor store will employ about 350 full-time and part-time union workers.
With the Westchester opening, Fairway has nearly 3,000 employees at its six stores and approximately $500 million in annual revenues, according to the Glickbergs”™ business partner, Sterling Investment Partners of Westport, Conn. Fairway has more than 10 million customers annually and the highest sales volume per square foot of any grocery store in the country.
The company, Fairway Group Holdings Corp., has spent about $10 million for its first venture in Westchester, Glickberg said. Connecticut”™s Fairfield County will see its first Fairway Market with the expected October opening of a 70,000-square-foot store at Harbor Point in Stamford. Fairway will start its build-out there the day after its April 14 grand opening in Pelham Manor, Glickberg said.
With the moves into the tristate suburban market ”“ Fairway also has opened stores in Paramus, N.J., and Plainview, Long Island, in the last two years ”“ revenues could grow to $750 million, according to Charles Santoro, Sterling Investment managing partner and co-founder and Fairway chairman.
The Glickberg family and their former business partners, Harold Seybert and David Sneddon, operated only the Upper West Side market until about 14 year ago, when they opened a Fairway store on Harlem”™s west side. In 2006, Fairway expanded across the East River to Red Hook, Brooklyn, opening a market in a converted Civil War-era coffee factory. The company will open another store in Douglaston, Queens, and plans to open 15 stores over the next few years, a spokesman for Fairway said.
Sterling Investment in 2008 paid about $150 million to buy out Glickberg”™s partners”™ shares in the business following their retirement. The new private equity partner has spurred the company”™s fast-paced expansion. In January, Fairway completed a $114-million debt financing that will be used to repay existing bank debt and fund future store expansion. The financing was led by Credit Suisse Securities (USA) L.L.C. and Jefferies Finance L.L.C.
“I”™m very conservative,” Glickberg said. “Without Sterling, we would have one store (opening) every three, four, five years.”
“Sterling allowed us to speed the expansion,” said Daniel Glickberg, the company”™s 26-year-old executive vice president and the fourth generation in his family”™s business.
A creative writing graduate of Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., the younger Glickberg has a broader ambition and vision for the family business. Building on the business his father grew, “I want to become a national corporation,” he said. “We”™re going to go into communities until they say they don”™t want us.”
