Aldi opening discount grocery store in Bohemia

Aldi will open its 10th Long Island store this month as part of an “aggressive nationwide growth” plan that includes opening 150 new supermarkets this year, the discount grocer said.

The new store will open Aug. 25 at 5151 Sunrise Hwy. in Sayville Plaza in Bohemia, the chain said in a statement Friday.

“Our stores are designed to make grocery shopping smarter, faster and easier, and we’ve been voted the price leader for five years running,” Chris Daniels, South Windsor regional vice president for Aldi, said in the statement. “We’re excited to open our first Aldi store in Bohemia and introduce local customers to a new, more affordable way of shopping.”

Aldi, home décor retailer At Home and flooring store Floor & Decor have divvied up 110,000 square feet of space that Kmart vacated in 2020 in Sayville Plaza.

(At Home, which opened in April, also is using space left vacant by OfficeMax, Borders Books and Sports Authority.) 

Aldi will be opening in about 30,000 square feet in the shopping center.

Like Trader Joe’s and Lidl, Aldi is a limited-assortment grocer, which is a discount supermarket operator whose stores are smaller and carry fewer products than traditional grocery stores do.  Limited-assortment stores also have a high percentage of their own private-label brands.

Aldi, a German grocery chain with American headquarters in Batavia, Illinois, has 2,200 stores in 38 U.S. states, including about 100 stores it opened last year.

Since entering the Long Island market in 2011, Aldi has opened nine stores in the area.  The retailer also is planning to open two more Long Island stores — in Hicksville and Carle Place, according to real estate firms’ representatives.  But the grocer has not confirmed that it will be opening stores in those areas.

Aldi is the fourth-largest grocery chain in the United States, based on store count, but it says it is on track to become the third largest by the end of the year.

Aldi is able to expand quickly by building distribution centers in new areas of the country and then opening stores, said Jon Hauptman, senior director of Inmar Intelligence, a retail industry analytics company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

“They’re small, efficient operators and can ‘stand up’ a store relatively quickly, given they use a standard ‘template’,” he said.

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.