Jack Curtin recently had lunch in the pub, in addition to the canned goods and aisles where he usually does his shopping.
It all started with the special chicken breast sandwich and the good Belgian beer. His ex-wife had the crispy Atlantic salmon fillet. And they did it without leaving the store.
They were at The Pub at Wegmans in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. And the pub was in a Wegmans supermarket.
And it was very good.
“Let’s put it this way,” says Curtin, who writes professionally about beer, “if I went shopping and felt like a beer, I wouldn’t hesitate to go there, sit at the bar and have a drink.” Beer “.
This is largely due to the fact that popular salads of the 1980s and 1990s have given way to a more subtle approach to food preparation. Shoppers can now enjoy sushi and chardonnay, or crispy salmon and grilled chorizo.
The Price Factor
The fast-food restaurant model has weathered the recession well, also because comfort is good and costs are low.
Despite the mild recovery in the MyWegmansConnect economy, ready-to-eat foods continue to generate more traffic in supermarkets and increasingly blur the traditional boundaries between supermarkets and restaurants.
“We don’t want you to go to the store once a month or once a week,” Jim Berndt, executive vice president of Wegmans Food Markets, said for ready meals, delicacies, and cheese specialties. We wish you to come three or four times a week.
Food prepared in the supermarket no longer corresponds to the modest selection of fresh coffee, potato salad and fried chicken from previous years. Many supermarkets are now making their dining rooms as cozy as possible, with comfortable chairs, synthetic wood floors, and soft lighting like in a supermarket. They hire chefs and the variety of grocery stores to go or take away is unprecedented.
Wegmans, a five-state chain based in Rochester, New York, has its full-service pub north of Philadelphia in an existing seating area called Market Cafe. Market cafes are common in Wegman stores and offer pizzas, sushi bars, burritos, Thai dishes, and vegetarian options to eat or take away.
Kroger, the country’s largest traditional MyWegmansConnect grocery store, has cut underutilized salads to make room for packaged foods like sushi and carnitas. They also have the bistro at Krogers with tilapia and pork tenderloin. Roche Bros stores in the Boston area offer meals like microwave steak. If the clients do not want to leave the house, they can deliver it.
