A look inside NYC’s luxury grocery boom

If lines down the block, sold-out products, and viral moments are any indication, premium grocery is having a moment in New York City.

Century-old Upper East Side staple Butterfield Market has recently been adopted as an influencer favorite, and this year took over FYPs with its viral Dotcakes, with lines starting at 6am to nab the sprinkle-topped cake in a cup. Lines also stretched through Tribeca last fall, when Meadow Lane first opened its doors, with consumers eager to taste test its viral prepared foods. Seafood specialist Citarella, another 100-year-old NYC institution, expanded to the Hamptons this spring, while West Village cheese purveyor Murray’s Cheese has continued to grow its business, especially around the holidays.

At the Summer Fancy Foods Show in New York City last month, Retail Brew moderated a panel with these four retailers to discuss how they’re navigating—and leaning into—the city’s luxury grocery renaissance. Here are some notable thoughts they had to share:

These responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

On the resurgence of premium grocery

“At Murray’s, we tend to see our business thrive in moments of economic uncertainty. Premium grocery is an affordable luxury…When consumers are feeling the pinch on their wallets, across the board, they may not be spending as much on those bigger-ticket items, and instead are looking for everyday luxuries that allow them to close the gap between everyday life and the trip to Europe that they may not be taking this year.”—Elizabeth Chubbuck, chief strategy officer at Murray’s Cheese

“People are paying more attention to ingredients, people are paying more attention to what’s on the label, [and] people are paying more attention to where their food is coming from, how the farmers are being treated. That matters more than maybe it has in the past, and people are willing to pay a higher price when that item checks most of those boxes.”—Sara McMonigle, director of purchasing at Butterfield Market

On virality and customer loyalty

“If they come for a Dotcake, but then they walk in and they’re discovering so many more things, and and they’re seeing how we’re curating items, and they’re seeing our staff and how they’re being treated in the store, and the energy within the store, then that’s when they say, ‘Oh, wow, I got this Dotcake, but boy, do I want to come back to this market.’”—McMonigle

“You can bring someone in through the door, but you need the quality and the warmth and the staff that are capable of getting them in a second time…One thing that we’ve done—which is a little counterintuitive—we pretty much ignore everything that’s made us viral. We cut the chicken nuggets a week into opening, because that was such a viral item, and we try to cater towards the neighborhood repeat customer. If the viral customer still comes in, that’s great, but we will never build our business for the viral customer.”—Frances Trousdale, director of operations, Meadow Lane

On product curation and the in-store experience

“We pride ourselves on training the team. It’s so important to give them the education that they’ve become artisans in their own craft. Whether you are a fishmonger or you’re a cheese monger, you’re a butcher—we’ve given them that. It’s that exposure to amazing products and that education to help translate that to our customer, which is a very educated customer about food, about everything, and so we get to give them that clean experience as they come into our market.”—Helen Gurrera, president at Citarella

“Particularly now in the world of CPG, it’s so highly saturated, and good marketing and good branding feels nearly ubiquitous. Being able to curate it to a point where the consumer can look through the branding, and they can look through incredible packaging, and they can actually say, ‘I believe this tortilla chip is good because it’s here’ is really nice, and I think it alleviates a burden to a grocery shopper, and that was a huge priority for us when we were sourcing.”—Trousdale

On pricing strategy

“We’re looking at a shifting customer base and knowing that we need to start building our next generation of customers. It’s a younger customer; the neighborhood demographics have shifted. We’ve really looked beyond the EDLPs [Every Day Low Price] within our cheese group into the grocery categories, and said, ‘What’s going to bring somebody in the door who doesn’t have as much disposable income as our core customer?’...You can find specialty foods in all the grocery stores. So the role of the smaller-footprint boutique retailer in this space becomes more of that curation. It’s a careful decision about what you’re going to put on your shelves with an understanding of what that price range needs to look like, and really curating the different price points to the different customers that you’re looking to bring in.”—Chubbuck

“We purposely charge pretty low amounts for things like the chicken salad, which is $12, which is pretty much no margin for us, so we attempt to do that where we can. But we’ve also found that for the majority of our customers, people are really willing to spend disproportionately in the name of health and wellness…It’s massive what people are willing to spend, so we basically charge as little as we can to make it functional with our labor.”—Trousdale