Uncle Giuseppe’s Marketplace aims to transport its shoppers to Italy. It’s an immersive experience shopping at this Long Island-based specialty grocer, where Italian opera music often plays, painted murals of rolling Tuscan hills decorate the store, dried herbs and cured meats hang from the butcher counter ceiling, and shoppers can always find hot-and-ready house-made classic Italian dishes galore.

While the local grocery chain has non-Italian offerings — including a sushi counter and generic grocery items that allow shoppers to complete a full-basket shop — authentic Italian foods and ingredients are the backbone of Uncle Giuseppe’s. And the grocer ensures that the products that bear its name carry a high level of authenticity.

The Uncle Giuseppe’s name brand stretches across center store items, ranging from Italian cuisine staples like dried pastas and sauces, to slightly more generic offerings such as spices and seasoning, Uncle Giuseppe’s President Mike Nelson said in an interview following a store tour Grocery Dive received of the grocer’s Melville, New York, store on Long Island in mid-February. 

The company's store brand may not account for a huge portion of its sales, but it does reinforce Uncle Giuseppe’s image as an Italian destination.

“We are a little more restrictive in what items we’ll put in a private label… so you won’t find Uncle Giuseppe’s canned corn in the canned vegetable aisle. We just don’t play in those categories that don’t make sense,” Nelson said. “But where we do play [is] anything that’s more Italian-centric.

Who makes the secret sauce? 

It takes a lot of cooks across a lot of different kitchens to make the nearly 100 private label SKUs on Uncle Giuseppe’s shelves. The grocer taps local, domestic and international suppliers that meet its ingredient standards and maintain that crucial Italian authenticity, Nelson said. 

Despite an array of suppliers, Uncle Giuseppe’s makes sure that the companies it works with use its original recipes, he said

“Our pasta sauce is a great example [because] that’s our proprietary recipe that we use a third party to produce for us,” he said. “We’ll go check it out while it’s being made and make sure it’s being made to our specifications with our ingredients.”

Many of Uncle Giuseppe’s hundreds of prepared foods inspire private label offerings and vice versa. For instance, the grocer recently switched up its homemade pasta recipe to use imported flour from Italy rather than domestic flour. This ultimately makes it more similar to the grocer’s dried private label pasta offering, which comes from an Italian supplier partner. 

“If you ever go to Italy and eat pasta, you don’t feel bloated afterwards, right? That’s because of the flour. And so we made that change last year,” Nelson said. 

Similarly, Uncle Giuseppe’s recently started packaging the breadcrumb recipe it was already using for its prepared foods, like chicken cutlets, Nelson said. 

The grocer has a wide assortment of store brand spices and seasonings, and while Nelson acknowledges that spices aren’t inherently Italian, they’re an example of the grocer taking the extra step to ensure all spices offered to customers are of the highest quality. 

“We use a local supplier for the spices,” Nelson said. “The spices themselves are of really high quality [and] specifications. So that’s what we require for our private label — we expect that our customers are going to get a quality product.” 

Nelson added that Uncle Giuseppe’s uses its branded ingredients, such as its sauces and spices, in dishes across its prepared meal offerings. 

Uncle Giuseppe’s doesn’t simply trust any Italian product. Its managers take an annual trip to Italy to look for new suppliers, Nelson said. 

“[We attend] food shows over there to see what’s new and trending, and go visit vendors and see what they’re bringing to market,” he said. 

Of all Uncle Giuseppe’s private label products, the Italian staples — pasta, pasta sauce and olive oils — are the grocer’s most popular items and account for the highest volume in sales, Nelson said.

Showstopping displays

Uncle Giuseppe’s is no stranger to creating eye-catching food displays, with chocolate fountains behind decadent candy counters, rows and rows of hot meals, and a wall of freshly baked breads. So it’s no surprise that the grocer takes a similar approach when showcasing its store brand items. 

Endcaps play a clear role in Uncle Giuseppe’s strategy, with nearly every endcap in Uncle Giuseppe’s Melville store standing tall and well stocked exclusively with private label offerings.

“They’re really unique, impactful displays of our private label products you see on the front ends of our store,” Nelson said. “We rotate out the items that are in there throughout the year. But we think that display really shows off who we are and what we’re all about.” 

The grocer also tries to showcase what pairs well together, specifically its housemade dishes and private label offerings, Nelson said. Underneath the windows where shoppers can watch employees make the grocer’s fresh mozzarella, the grocer stocks an assortment of Uncle Giuseppe’s private items that pair well with the cheese, Nelson said.

Coming to shoppers nationwide…

With a dozen stores currently open and two more slated to debut this year, Uncle Giuseppe’s home turf stretches across Long Island and Westchester, New York, as well as New Jersey. But now, the grocer is gearing up to make its private label assortment available across the country. 

Last fall, during the grocer’s fourth quarter, Uncle Giuseppe’s began adding its store brand assortment to Amazon’s online marketplace, Nelson said. Currently, only a small set of around 20 Uncle Giuseppe’s items are available, but by the end of this year, the Italian retailer plans to have its full assortment of center store private label goods available through Amazon. 

“We get a lot of requests from people who move out of the New York area for our products. And we thought [what] made the most sense was to get it on Amazon to make our private label products available out there for folks in other markets,” Nelson said — a testament to Uncle Giuseppe’s local reputation and how much it resonates with its community.