An Amazon Fresh entry could change Connecticut supermarket scene
Brookfield could be the next beachhead in Connecticut’s highly competitive supermarket wars.
Well-informed speculation is that the store being built at 14 Candlewood Lake Road in the upper Fairfield County community will be Connecticut’s first Amazon Fresh bricks-and-mortar location.
If that is the case — town and company officials aren’t confirming it at this point — Amazon Fresh will become what is believed to be the first brick-and-mortar supermarket chain to expand into Connecticut since North Carolinabased Fresh Market opened its store in Westport in 2008.
Fresh Market followed up by opening a store in Avon in 2012 and one in Guilford in 2018.
Retail industry consultants and supermarket experts say that Connecticut is an attractive market for supermarket chain. But the COVID-19 pandemic has made entry into the market a little more difficult than in the past, they said.
“If you’re in supermarkets or any retail right now, you’re anxious about where things are going to land six months from now,” said Wayne Pesce, president of the Connecticut Food Association, a Hartford-based trade group representing the state’s supermarket operators. “It ain’t easy being brick and mortar these days.”
Right now, Amazon Fresh exists as both a grocery delivery service and a brick-and-mortar retailer with locations in Illinois and California. But that presence is going to change rapidly in the coming months.
Bloomberg News reported in
March that Amazon Fresh is working on at least 28 more stores from Philadelphia to the Sacramento suburbs.
Amazon Fresh is a sister company of Whole Foods, the online commerce giant’s other grocery subsidiary, and is viewed in the marketplace as the more affordable of the two brands.
Burt Flickinger, managing director of the Strategic Resource Group, a New York City-based business that does consulting work for retailers, said the sales numbers coming out of Amazon Fresh stores in Illinois and California “are phenomenal.”
“We expect them to open 8 to 10 stores in Connecticut before they are done, starting with the Brookfield location,” Flickinger said. “Amazon Fresh is easier for a consumers to navigate than the larger stores other chains have. They tend to be 20,000 to 25,000 square feet.”
Pesce agreed that Amazon Fresh stores in Connecticut will likely be very successful.
“I like the risks they are willing to take, and that if something doesn’t work out, they are willing to move on from it quickly,” he said. “Will everyone of them be successful? No, but they are very technology-driven, very innovative.”
Both Pesce and Flickinger said store closures brought on by COVID-19 may actually persuade new grocery chains to enter the Connecticut market.
“We’re a very small state with a high population in certain areas,” Pesce said. “But for someone to start from the ground up here, I don’t see that happening. If I’m a smart guy, I’m looking to buy an existing player within the market or some of their stores.”
Pesce said German discount grocer Lidl employed that strategy to enter the Long Island, N.Y. market, buying 24 Best Market locations in January 2019. Lidl, a rival of discount grocer Aldi, has not yet entered the Connecticut market.
Flickinger said mall operators are viewing supermarket locations as ideal replacements for anchor stores like Lord & Taylor or Sears that have closed. That may lead other grocery chains to enter the Connecticut market, he said.
“You look at the landscape of bankruptcies and liquidations,” Flickinger said. “There’s so much good vacant real estate out there with closed Macy’s and Sears stores. It’s a buyers market.”