King Kullen closing Middle Island supermarket

King Kullen, Long Island's largest family-owned grocery chain, is closing another supermarket, this time a 34-year-old store in Middle Island.

The store is located at 1235 Middle Country Rd. in the Strathmore Commons Shopping Center.

The supermarket occupies about 45,000 square feet, said Robert Monahan, property manager for Island Associates Real Estate Inc., the Smithtown-based company that manages the center.

Monahan confirmed that the store will be closing but said he did not know when or the reason for the impending shutdown.

The King Kullen in Middle Island opened in January 1991, according to a grand-opening advertisement in Newsday's archives. 

Headquartered in Hauppauge, King Kullen Grocery Co. did not respond to Newsday's inquiries Wednesday about the reason for the store's closing, the timeline for the closing and the number of affected employees.

Most of the grocery company's store employees are members of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

UFCW Local 1500 in Westbury represents 41 part-time and nine full-time employees working in the front-end, grocery, produce, dairy, frozen food, deli, bakery and receiving areas of King Kullen's Middle Island store, said Aly Y. Waddy, secretary-treasurer for the local union.

"Local 1500 is working to maintain as many jobs as possible. [There is] no indication of any layoffs yet," she said Wednesday. 

The impending closing of the Middle Island store is disappointing, since the shutdown will leave the hamlet in Brookhaven Town with one small grocery store, Sunny Farms Marketplace, said Gail Lynch-Bailey, president of the Middle Island Civic Association.

The 26,000-square-foot Sunny Farms opened in May on Middle Country Road, about a mile from the Middle Island King Kullen.

Citing last year's closing of Coram's only supermarket, a Stop & Shop that was 4.3 miles from the King Kullen in Middle Island, Lynch-Bailey said, "Now we have two major food chains that have left us and that's disturbing," she said. 

'America’s first supermarket'

King Kullen Grocery Co. operates 30 stores on Long Island, including 26 King Kullen supermarkets. The other four are Wild by Nature natural food stores.

Founded in Queens in 1930, King Kullen markets itself as "America’s first supermarket," a claim confirmed by the Smithsonian Institution.

King Kullen is still the largest family-owned grocery chain on Long Island, but the grocer and other traditional supermarket chains have closed a number of stores over the past several years as more discount and specialty grocery competitors have expanded in or entered the Long Island market.

Last year, Quincy, Massachusetts-based Stop & Shop, a traditional supermarket chain that is the largest grocer on Long Island, where it has 46 supermarkets, closed 32 Northeast stores, including four on Long Island, that it said were underperforming. 

Since 2019, King Kullen Grocery Co. has closed seven stores, including a King Kullen supermarket in Levittown in October that the company said was underperforming.

The company closed three other stores — in Mount Sinai, Lake Ronkonkoma and North Babylon — which it said were underperforming, in 2019, several months after Stop & Shop said it would buy all King Kullen Grocery Co.'s stores, which then totaled 37.

The Stop & Shop deal was called off in June 2020.

King Kullen Grocery Co. closed two King Kullen stores in Franklin Square and Glen Cove in July 2022 and a Wild by Nature in May 2023. 

By Tory N. Parrish

tory.parrish@newsday.comToryParrish1

Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.