Wegmans mall supermarket end could signal future trend.

Wegmans is laying the groundwork for its first Connecticut store in Norwalk, less than four miles from the headquarters of Stew Leonard’s. In April, a Norwalk businessman who sold his parcel to Wegmans told CT Insider “a lot of people are going to be shook up” at the size of the store that the company envisions.

More than a year after the Wegman’s debut at the Natick Mall, Stew Leonard’s opened its own mall supermarket in a former Sears shell at the Paramus Park Mall in New Jersey.

The Stew Leonard’s store at the Paramus Park Mall totals 80,000 square feet of space, far smaller than the recently expanded flagship store in Norwalk, but nevertheless with an expansive feel to the visitor’s eye. The Paramus Park Mall is close to several big grocery chains and specialty food stores, including ShopRite, Whole Foods Market, Trader Joe’s, BJ’s Wholesale and Amazon Fresh, which took over a former Fairway Market there last year.

At midday on Sunday, ample numbers of shoppers were coming and going at the Stew Leonard’s store at Paramus Park, despite the larger mall being closed for the day under Bergen County’s historic “blue laws” limiting retail operations on Sundays.

Stew Leonard’s now has a second New Jersey store in the works for Clifton, taking over a former kosher supermarket space at an open-air shopping center. The company did not state immediately if any other enclosed malls were under consideration, but did not rule out suburban malls in any future expansion plans.

Jake Tavello ran the Paramus store after its September 2019 opening, and is now chief operating officer for Stew Leonard’s. 

“When our family opened Stew Leonard’s in Paramus in September 2019, being in a mall — as well as selling food and wine together — was a new format for us,” Tavello told CT Insider in an email response to a query on how the store has fared. “But right out of the gate, despite the challenges of [COVID-19] hitting just six months after we opened our doors, the store performed exceptionally well, and our foot traffic in Paramus is on par with our other, more established stores.”

Closer to home, however, the Wegmans experience in Natick opens questions on the viability of repurposing any Connecticut mall spaces as traditional grocery stores.

Connecticut malls have a number of empty pads statewide that include former Lord & Taylor stores at Danbury Fair and Trumbull Mall — recently renamed after Namdar Realty Group’s acquisition of Westfield Trumbull — where a large new apartment complex is nearing completion opposite the Lord & Taylor entrance.

In Stamford, Whole Foods grabbed a portion of a former freestanding Lord & Taylor store. Jordan’s Furniture took a fourth Lord & Taylor box at Westfarms in Farmington.

There are multiple mall supermarkets nationally besides the Wegmans and Stew Leonard’s stores, including under the ShopRite brand which also opened in 2019 at the Stroud Mall in Stroudsburg, Pa., a comparatively small mall about 80 miles west of New York City.

In a CBS interview during construction of the Stew Leonard’s in Paramus, CEO Stew Leonard Jr. emphasized the need for supermarkets to experiment to stay relevant, with the company his father started being renowned for the unique path it took from cookie-cutter supermarket design.

“I’ve always looked at Sears as a great retailer — and now to see us taking over a Sears, I will sit there and say, ‘Boy, we have to keep changing too as retailers,'” Leonard told CBS at the time. “It’s just a message to all businesses in America, you know — you have to change.”

Includes prior reporting by Jailene Cuevas, Jonah Dylan, Paul Schott and Luther Turmelle.