After navigating a bit of an identity crisis, The Fresh Market has set its sights back on rediscovering its roots.
CEO Brian Johnson, who took over the top role in February, said the specialty grocer has put its goal of creating a European-esque grocery shopping experience back at the forefront, with foodservice as a star attraction along with a soothing atmosphere and a hospitable staff.
“It’s all about going back to our roots and what made The Fresh Market special. … You’ve got to know who you are,” Johnson said, noting that since joining the company as COO five years ago, he and the executive team have made a conscious effort to lean into the specialty grocer’s original vision. Johnson added that these points of differentiation include focusing on guests, offering value and keeping the retailer relevant.
While store expansion is in the works, Johnson said the grocer will grow its fleet at a moderate pace in order to maintain The Fresh Market’s culture and in-store experience. Shoppers can also look forward to a new app that better ties in the grocer’s loyalty program.
Johnson spoke with Grocery Dive to provide insights on The Fresh Market’s priorities, outline how it approaches differentiation and share details on its upcoming app.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
GROCERY DIVE: What are The Fresh Market’s biggest differentiators compared to traditional supermarkets as well as fellow specialty grocers?
BRIAN JOHNSON: I would say that [our differentiation] starts with our service and our people. Because we are a smaller footprint, and because we offer a lot of services in our stores — with fresh cut meat, our service meat counters, our service deli counters, our service bakery counters — there are many, many instances when a guest shops with us, they’re going to interact with our people. So that’s a service, and we call it impeccable hospitality… and that makes up that differentiated shopping experience from a service perspective.
Being called The Fresh Market, our [fresh department] is certainly a differentiator for us. We offer fresh-cut meat that we cut fresh every single day. In our bakery, those ovens are on every day. We’re baking fresh products. Our produce is the highest grade product that we can buy. In our deli, or our convenience meal solution area, as we call it, we’ve got many, many either low- or no-cook meals that are chef-quality. All of these things are differentiating points for us.
In our grocery department, we’ve got a very interesting assortment. We have some of the world’s best products, but we also have some of the highest quality and unique local products from around the different markets that we serve here in the U.S., and that’s something that we’re really working on expanding in our stores — having more of those local items. That element of discovery makes our stores fun.
And then we’ve got the relaxing music and the relaxed atmosphere in our stores. So you come in and you may have had a stressful day, but you come into a very relaxing atmosphere with a lot of these very interesting products and great service.
Can you talk more about how The Fresh Market approaches foodservice? How does the offering continue to evolve?
It’s very difficult to execute if you’re not 100% committed, because it’s very labor-intensive. We’re committed to it. We understand the importance of providing convenient, high-quality, and, in many cases, healthy meal solutions to our guests who are, in most cases, very time-starved.
People in our society today, we’re all super busy, yet we still want to eat well, and we want to provide that solution where you can buy [affordable] high-quality meals that are either already prepped for you or require very little preparation. We want to be able to meet all of those needs, because we think that by focusing on that, it’s a great point of differentiation for us. There are certainly others in the industry that do a very good job of it, but we feel that it is certainly a strength of ours.
In our new stores, we’ve got a barbecue program where we’ve got smokers in these stores. We’re smoking brisket, and we’ve got fresh, world-class barbecue in these new stores that our guests rave about. That was introduced with our first new store of this decade, and it was introduced at our first remodel, which is our store in Greensboro, North Carolina. And then all the new stores, starting from that point forward, have gotten our barbecue program. I’m from Texas. Barbecue is close to my heart, and I can tell you, our barbecue is fantastic.
In what ways has The Fresh Market implemented technology into its operations and stores?
We just completed rolling out electronic shelf labels in every store in our company. We’ve also got an in-stock too, called Captana. So what it does is it will periodically take snapshots of our shelves — and it does not take pictures of our guests, by the way, so there’s no privacy concerns there — for up-to-the-minute [inventory levels] in every single store in the company. Most retailers have visibility into the in-store inventory balance, but they don’t know if it’s on the shelf or in the back room. I know if it’s on the shelf. It’s enabled us to increase our on-shelf and in-stock percentage, which has been a huge help and really provides a much better shopping experience for our guests.
You mentioned the upcoming launch of an updated app for The Fresh Market customers. What will the app look like and what will it offer shoppers?
We’re working on developing a new app, and we’re in the early stages of it. The goal of the app is to provide a much better experience for our guests, one that’s seamless, that really delivers on our shopping experience digitally, just like in the store. So we want to take our impeccable hospitality and incorporate that same shopping experience onto our app. And that’s not easy to do. We’re still working on the discovery phase on that, and we’re kind of mapping out what that looks like.
There are a lot of things that we’ll be able to do with the app. One example would be helping guests find the items they’re looking for. So we can tie that into our electronic shelf labels that have a blinking light. And if a guest is looking for an item in the olive oil set that they can’t find, they can push a button and the light will start blinking on the tag so they can find it.
One of the big drivers of us wanting to develop a new app is that we want to incorporate the elements of our loyalty program [into it].
Sometime in 2026, the app will be ready to pilot. We want to make sure that we do all our due diligence to get it right.
What does store growth under the revamped store format look like for The Fresh Market?
With us, efficiency is important, but what’s even more important is making sure that we continue to strive to be even more relevant than yesterday. So while we want to be efficient, because we want to pass those efficiencies on to our guests, we also want to make sure that we are ramping up that in-store experience.
I think it would be easy to do some things from a cost-cutting perspective, but we might lose a little bit of interest in our stores. And we don’t want to do that. We want to make sure our stores are super interesting, because honestly, our brand is our moat, and we want to make sure that brand is as strong as it can possibly be. We constantly tweak things [in our format] to make sure that we’re being relevant.
This year, we’ll open 11 stores — that’s kinda the range that we’re looking at moving forward — and we’ll ramp up from there as we continue to grow and as we continue to tweak things.
We could open more stores, but it’s important to us that we staff these new stores with great people, and so when we open a new store, we put a current manager in that new store. We’re not going to hire someone [new] to manage our new stores, because culture at The Fresh Market is extremely important.
