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Fleming Companies, an Oklahoma City-based wholesale food distributor and owner of the Piggly Wiggly supermarket franchise, has developed a concept called Chef's Cupboard in 150 of its markets, offering food on a par with Boston Market. Fleming has also begun a new market prototype in Hartsfield, Ohio, called the IGA Supercenter. At the 62,000-sq.-ft. grocery behemoth, shoppers can drop off their kids at an on-site center and monitor them on TVs set up in the aisles; pick up traditional food or a hot entree, or take a lesson at IGA's cooking school; withdraw money at the store bank; pick up their dry cleaning; and send a fax at the business center.
It's a new role for the supers, a migration from being distributors of food to purveyors of meals and services. "Ten years ago, if you asked a produce manager to sell washed lettuce, he'd say, 'Why? People can go home and wash it themselves,'" says consultant Carin Solganik, vice president of Solganik & Associates in Dayton, Ohio. Yet prepackaged salads (O.K., bags of lettuce) have become a $2 billion business.
At Gelson's Markets, an upmarket grocer in Los Angeles, shoppers can order a brick-oven pizza or a chinois chicken salad at an in-store Wolfgang Puck's To Go and dine by a roaring fireplace in a cozy corner of the market--a move that would have once seemed about as down-market as getting ready for a date at the makeup counter at Macy's. The Ukrop's chain, based in Richmond, Va., has been selling prepared meals since the mid-'80s. Today 45% of store space is devoted to selling 130 takeout items, which are freshly prepared, often in front of customers.
If the supermarket is starting to look more like a restaurant, places like EatZi's in Dallas are an unconventional hybrid of the two. Started by Phil Romano, the founder of Fuddruckers restaurant chain, EatZi's serves more than 400 items like poached raspberry salmon ($4.99 a portion) or grilled tenderloin ($19.99 per lb.) prepared by 35 on-site chefs and bakers daily. Shoppers can sniff 100 different kinds of cheeses or make their own six-packs of international and domestic microbrews to the strains of Italian opera.
Romano's gourmet smorgasbord has mouth-watering numbers too. EatZi's has sales per sq. ft. of $1,500, easily outdistancing the $200 at regular grocery stores. Even tastier are EatZi's profit margins. At 12% to 15% of sales, they are more than four times the 2% to 3% that most grocers bag. Having tinkered with the concept for a couple of years, Romano is taking EatZi's national. Already in Dallas and Houston, EatZi's opened last month in Atlanta and will stock shelves in Westbury, N.Y., and Manhattan by the end of this year. "Women come in and say, 'Thank you. I never have to cook again,'" says Romano. "And men come in and say, 'Thank you. I never have to marry again.'"