Going grocery shopping while hungry has traditionally been a bad idea, as it boosts impulse purchases and can demolish carefully crafted, well-disciplined menu plans.
Now, though, being hungry when you get to the grocery store can be an opportunity to try new food and eat it right there in the store — prior to shopping at Whole Foods Market, Foodland Farms at Ala Moana Center or Times Supermarket’s Taste of Times in Mililani.
Neapolitan-style pizza, burgers, sandwiches, smoked meats, Chinese roast pork, salads, poke bowls, customized musubi, freshly made doughnuts, steak plates and more can fill the tummy prior to filling the cart.
The ‘grocerant’
In a 1996 article titled “Call Them Grocerants,” carried in two industry publications, Steven Johnson, a Washington state-based food-service consultant, was among the first to use the term that has since come to define a trend in supermarket dining. Johnson, who calls himself the “Grocerant Guru,” consults in the grocerant niche through his company, Foodservice Solutions.
The term is now widely used to refer to traditional grocery stores that offer a wide range of prepared food as well as cooking stations for made-to-order options. Many also offer seating, like a food court.
Meal service in supermarkets is nothing new — Safeway stores in Hawaii, for example, have long offered a range of choices out of their delis, including made-to-order sandwiches and sushi to go. Extensive salad bars and hot bars are a key feature at Down to Earth natural-food stores. The grocerant is an extension of those concepts.
Restaurant aspirations
Hawaii’s grocerants are focused on restaurant-quality food, according to interviews with the companies.
“Whole Foods Market is full of people that are very passionate about high-quality food and culinary experiences — and we’re always looking to bring innovation to what we do,” said Janette Rizk, who handles public relations for the Southern Pacific region of Whole Foods.
“The prepared foods department is, essentially, many restaurants within each Whole Foods Market store,” Rizk said.
Most stores offer 150 items daily. The Kahala and Kailua Whole Foods have restaurants inside, where customers can either order food (and beer or wine) or bring in pizza, sushi, sandwiches, freshly made burritos or other dishes purchased in the store, she said.
Foodland Super Market in Ala Moana Center reopened as Foodland Farms — three times bigger and many times more modern — in August after a two-year closure.
Jenai Wall, chief executive officer of Foodland Super Market Ltd., said the company has been incorporating pieces of the grocerant concept for several years, and brought on corporate chef Keoni Chang to elevate the offerings.
“What the (Ala Moana) store afforded us the opportunity to do,” Wall said, “was put all our ideas together and really change the way we presented everything, and create the atmosphere that made the food come to life.”
The planning for the Taste of Times’ grocerant operation in Mililani took 18 months to two years and has involved the company’s chefs and bakers and much travel, said Chris Borden, senior director of marketing and merchandise.
Most of Times’ prepared food is made from scratch, including sandwiches that use freshly baked bread, potato and sweet potato chips cut and fried in the store, and 50th State Poultry chicken, seasoned with a proprietary spice blend, said Times chef Mark Cunningham.
At the grand opening last week, a sampling of Chinese roast pork ($12 a pound) and beef brisket ($9.99 a pound) had customers coming back for containers to take home. Glistening roasted ducks ($25 for whole, $13 for half) hung in the display case.
More to come
Grocery and restaurant industry publications talk about the battle for “share of stomach,” and the chatter has gotten louder since the U.S. Census Bureau reported that consumer spending in restaurants beat grocery sales for the first time in December 2014.
Industry publication Nation’s Restaurant News reported that by April 2016 restaurant sales had eclipsed those of grocery stores by $1.5 billion.
Millennials’ spending habits are cited as a main reason for the shift, prompting the nation’s grocers to up their game with more prepared food, at lower prices than restaurants charge, according to the American Egg Board.
In some ways grocery stores have the upper hand over stand-alone restaurants. The stores can be better positioned to compete on prices, given their longer hours of operation and greater buying power. Times’ roast duck is significantly less expensive than the duck at a nearby restaurant, for instance.
The trend is likely to continue with the construction of a new Whole Foods Market in Kakaako, which is set to open in 2018, as well as plans by Foodland and Times to expand their respective grocerants.
Wall said Foodland will bring the grocerant concept to more of its stores “within the next five years if not sooner. It really depends on the right location and how much work we can do in the store.”
Company officials are devising a game plan, she said.
“In the prepared-foods area, everything has performed to our expectations or better,” Wall said.
Borden said Times plans to expand its grocerants to eight additional locations, also over the next five years.
The next Whole Foods, set amid luxury high-rises in Kakaako, will be 55,000 square feet, by far its largest store in Hawaii.
The new outlets will be part of a market with impressive growth numbers. Dining in at, and taking out from, grocery stores has grown some 30 percent, according to the research company NPD Group. The growth translates to 2.4 billion food-service visits, for $10 billion in consumer spending in 2015.
