The Fresh Market is a European market-inspired chain that you will wish you had heard of
sooner. Each store features a ready-made meals section, bakery, butcher counter, and large
fresh produce section. Here's what you should know before shopping at The Fresh Market.
In 1980, a man by the name of Ray Berry decided to leave his job in which he oversaw 3,600
7-Eleven stores for The Southland Company, according to Greensboro, North Carolina's
News & Record. After quitting his job, he and his wife, Beverly Berry, moved to Greensboro,
and started a grocery store in line with the look and feel of the European food markets
they had seen during their visit to the continent. Markets such as the Saint-Quinten Market in
Paris had, and still continue to have, bistros, vendors who sell locally-sourced fish, butcher
shops, and separate spaces for organic produce and flowers.
According to The Fresh Market's website, Ray and Beverly used all their personal savings
to start their dream store on Lawndale Drive, offering locally-grown produce, an old-world
style butcher shop and fish market, as well as an in-store bakery. The store was small
compared to the supermarkets that saw a boom post-World War II. The Fresh market opened
just a year prior to the 1983 opening of the first Costco and Sam's Club stores, which
both offered bulk-sized discount shopping.
If you thought curators only worked in museums, well, we have news for you. At The Fresh Market,
there is a specialty food curator for each department — from grocery to produce to
cheese and so on. The video series Meet the Curators launched by The Fresh Market in 2019
introduced shoppers to some of the curators at the chain, such as certified olive oil
expert Emily Reass,
"A good olive oil, when you coat the inside of your mouth, will never feel greasy. It
should feel very clean."
Another curator the Fresh Market introduced is meat and seafood expert Peter Mayes:
"The reason I do what I do is to hear comments from our guest like 'This is the best meat
I ever bought at a grocery store.'"
The company, with help from 25Madison — a New York City-based venture studio that invests
in and assists startups — analyzes food trends to plan new products in their stores.
According to Supermarket News, The firm helps The Fresh Market stay up to date by identifying
companies or brands that could "could disrupt or create market trends."
Based on this data and the data gathered from food trade shows and interaction with vendors,
the food curators source products months before they hit the store shelves. Analyzing the
trends and then acting on them has proved to work for the company. Plant-based foods
such as cauliflower pizza and beverages such as kombucha, which were added based on the
trend forecast in 2019, performed well in stores, according to the report in Supermarket
News.
Despite the smaller footprint of The Fresh Market stores, the retailer offers three times
the variety of produce than a traditional grocery store, according to their website.
And you can be sure that produce is more than good enough to eat. As Dennis Payne, Fresh
Market's senior category manager of produce retail, explained in a press release:
"Rather than having fruit picked just before it is fully ripe and then shipped on a boat,
we will pay the extra freight cost to have the fruit flown in, so it is in our stores
in the shortest amount of time after harvest."
It is particularly important that fruits such as cherries and grapes are left to ripen fully
before picking them as they, unlike bananas or avocados, do not store any starches that
would later convert into sugars. Payne went on to explain in the release:
"An example is when we offered cherries from Tasmania, Australia in the winter, when you
normally do not get to enjoy them fresh."
During apple season, The Fresh Market stocks 15 varieties of apples and in the summer,
14 varieties of melons. Certain hard-to-find tropical fruits such as jackfruit, rambutan,
and lychees are also made available when in season. In Fall 2019, the grocery chain offered
not just seasonal produce, but more than 60 pumpkin-flavored items, including pasta sauce,
salsa, coffee, cookies, hot cocoa, snack mixes, yogurt-covered pretzels, and bakery items,
according to Supermarket News.
Almost every department of The Fresh Market features a generous offering of imported food
products. We're talking jumbo blueberries from Peru, watermelon-basil and elderflower-flavored
sparkling waters from Australia, switchel from the United Kingdom, holiday cookies from
Germany, and winter glögg from Sweden.
To curate a collection of Italian cheese at The Fresh Market, the grocery chain's head
cheese buyer Andy Harvell visited several Parmigiano-Reggiano plants in the Parma region
of Italy to decide on the perfect one to bring back to the store shelf.
"Every wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano that is in our stores comes from the exact same producer."
The choices were narrowed down to eight producers, each of whom sent their 85-pound cheese wheels
to The Fresh Market headquarters for the team to taste and decide. While the tour did help
add a new product to The Fresh Market's stores, it also inspired the Italian Heritage Month
celebration in October 2019, in which the company highlighted its list of Italian imports
that include pasta, sauce, pizza, and gelato among others.
For those who don't feel like cooking but still want to have a healthy home-cooked meal,
The Fresh Market offers Market Meal Kits. Similar to a subscription service like Blue
Apron or Home Chef, each kit includes all the ready and prepped ingredients — all
sourced from the store — that you'll need to create a delicious meal. The Fresh Market
also offers "Little Big Meals" that are easy to prepare and come with a choice of protein,
vegetable sides and dessert.
In 2019, The Fresh Market curated a non-alcoholic beverage aisle, offering some 70 new brands,
and 300 new products, according to Euromonitor International. These new alcohol-free drinks
included adaptogenics, which are drinks that contain natural herbs and help relieve stress,
non-alcoholic beer, and beer-inspired waters.
The company also offered never-before-heard-of brands such as Asarasi, which sells organic
sparkling water sourced from maple trees, Richard's Rainwater, which is essentially
rainwater in a bottle, and Napa Hills Vineyard Enriched Waters, which is like wine but without
the calories or alcohol. The Fresh Market told Supermarket News that it was the first
retailer to bring specialty lemonades and sodas from, quote, "across the pond." These
drinks include artisanal lemonades from France and the U.K.-based Bottlegreen Sparkling sodas.
Although The Fresh Market has a lot going for it, a 2018 24/7 Wall St. report named
the grocery chain one of "America's most hated companies." The outlet came up with its rating
system after reviewing news events, customer surveys, employee reviews, and brand value
from the previous year. 24/7 Wall St. reported,
"[The Fresh Market] is rated as the worst place to work among major employers, according
to [1,600] Glassdoor reviews."
In addition to the company's 2.2 star rating, only about 25 percent of employees said they
would recommend the company to their friends and only 21 percent "had a positive outlook
for the business." Based on over 7,000 interviews conducted between May 2019 and May 2020, YouGov
published a report that cited The Fresh Market pretty low on the list. The Fresh Market came
in 14th place for popular grocery stores, far below its competitors Whole Foods and
Trader Joe's. According to the data, only 34 percent of those interviewed had a positive
opinion of the store, compared to 54 percent for Whole Foods and 61 percent for Trader
Joe's.
In 2016, some six years after going public, The Fresh Market was taken over by Apollo
Global Management for a whopping $1.36 billion. This, the Charlotte Observer suggests, was
due to pressure from national chains like Walmart and Kroger, as well as competitors
like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's.
Since the buyout, the grocery store underwent a complete makeover. The prices of many of
its items across the store were lowered and almost 1,300 new items such as baby products
and cleaning supplies were added to the inventory. For the prior three decades, the grocer was
known only for offering specialty food, according to another report by the Charlotte Observer.
But for the first time in over 30 years, customers could step into The Fresh Market and walk
out with a roll of toilet paper.
Besides the changes in the selection of products, the physical store itself went through a few
updates. The signature low bins with bulk candies and coffee were removed and replaced
with more traditional vertical aisles. The antiques that were part of the store decor
were replaced with food photos, the music within the store changed from classical to
jazz, and the lights which were otherwise dim turned brighter.
After pivoting from a specialty grocery store to more of an all-purpose store between 2016
and 2018, The Fresh Market actually decided to take a sharp U-turn and return to the ways
of the past. Under CEO Larry Appel, who was appointed in late 2017, the company shuttered
15 of its stores in 2018 and launched just one new store that year, so as to prioritize
its growth in stores that were already performing well. The company had 186 stores in 26 states
in 2016, but by 2020 The Fresh Market operated 161 stores in 22 states. Appel told the Charlotte
Observer,
"[The Fresh Market decided to get] back to [its] roots as a European market and as a
specialty market."
While The Fresh Market faces stiff competition from Kroger, Walmart, and Whole Foods, among
other grocers, the initiatives taken since 2018 have shown modest improvement, according
to a late 2019 report from Moody's Investor Service.
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