The Fresh Grocer enters New York State today with the opening of its first store on Long Island

Another grocer is entering Long Island’s increasingly competitive supermarket market.

On Friday, The Fresh Grocer opened its first store on Long Island — and its first in New York state — in Oakdale, 885 Montauk Hwy. in the Lighthouse Commons shopping center.

The full-service grocery store is owned by K. Thompson Foods, a family-owned business that also owns three ShopRite supermarkets on Long Island – in Deer Park, Riverhead and Uniondale.

“We chose The Fresh Grocer because we found this location in Oakdale. And we liked it. And we saw the need for a grocery store in this area,” said Ken Thompson, vice president and chief operating officer of K. Thompson Foods.

There are 21 other Fresh Grocer stores in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

The new 25,000-square-foot store in Oakdale features delicatessen, Italian specialties, international cheeses, a hot food counter, and a full-service bakery, butcher, fish and delicatessen department.

The store employs about 120 people, Thompson said.

The Fresh Grocer and ShopRite’s two registered trademarks are owned by Wakefern Food Corp., a Keasbey, New Jersey-based cooperative with nearly 50 member companies that independently own and operate 365 supermarkets in eight northeastern states. Most of the stores, 312, are ShopRite’s, while the rest belong to six other brands, including Price Rite Marketplace, Fairway Market and Gourmet Garage.

The Fresh Grocer stores are smaller and carry fewer products than ShopRites, which range in size from 5,500 to 9,200 square feet, said Wakefern spokeswoman Karen O’Shea.

The Fresh Grocer places a strong emphasis on fresh perishables and to-go items, and the stores tend toward the upscale market, says Jeff Metzger, editor of Food Trade News in Columbia, Maryland, and a Wantagh native.

Wakefern acquired The Fresh Grocer brand in 2013 when it was a Philadelphia chain with eight stores – six in Philadelphia, one in Wilmington, Delaware, and one in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The Philadelphia store became a ShopRite.

“The idea behind The Fresh Grocer (brand acquisition) was to expand Wakefern’s presence and give the company more flexibility and versatility as the company continues to grow or seeks to add new (co-op) members and new stores,” Metzger said.

Another store in the New York metropolitan area, in Brooklyn, will open in 2025, O’Shea said, but that store will not be owned by K. Thompson Foods.

Finding suitable retail space as far south as Oakdale is challenging, so the offering at the Lighthouse Commons shopping center is a better fit for The Fresh Grocer than for ShopRite, Thompson said.

Competition among Long Island grocery stores has increased in recent years as new players enter the market and traditional chains shrink.

The first Wegmans supermarket on Long Island is scheduled to open in Lake Grove in the first quarter of 2025, the Rochester-based chain said.

German discounter Aldi operates 13 stores on Long Island, including four that opened in the last two years. It plans to open five more stores on the island by fall 2025.

Upscale grocer Whole Foods, which opened its seventh Long Island store in Huntington Station in July, also plans to open a store in the former Sun Vet Mall, which was renamed The Shops at SunVet last year, in 2025 as part of its redevelopment of the Holbrook property into an open-air shopping center.

Meanwhile, Stop & Shop, the company with the largest market share in Long Island’s grocery retail sector, announced in July that it would close 32 “underperforming” supermarkets, including four on Long Island, by Nov. 2. That will leave just 46 Stop & Shop stores on Long Island, according to the Quincy, Massachusetts-based chain, which is owned by Dutch company Ahold Delhaize.

For Thompson, however, the fierce competition in Long Island’s grocery retail industry is nothing new; in fact, he welcomes it.

“It’s been that way since I’ve been in the business,” says Thompson, a second-generation grocer who has been in the supermarket business for more than 40 years.

A bigger challenge than increasing competition in the grocery trade is finding enough staff, especially since Thompson’s stores offer higher-value goods and services such as prepared meals, he said.

“We are now fighting for customers and also for employees,” he said.