Grocer Holiday Farms to open in former Fresh Market space in Woodbury

Grocery chain Holiday Farms is expanding into Woodbury, with a $1 million renovation of the space it plans to take — formerly The Fresh Market.

Holiday Farms, which has three existing stores — in Roslyn, Glen Head and Queens — will open its fourth store, in the high-end Woodbury Common shopping center, by early October, owner David Mandell said.

"I think it’s a great spot. I think we’re going to do well in Woodbury because it’s a similar demographic to Roslyn. And we’re really going to go out of our way to cater to the customer," he said.

Set to be located at 8285 Jericho Tpke., the new, 20,000-square-foot supermarket will be the largest tenant and an anchor in Woodbury Common.

The supermarket will have 30 to 40 full-time and part-time employees, Mandell said. The store will feature full-service deli and meat departments, fresh produce, baked goods, and a cheese department, Mandell said. Holiday Farms offers delivery through its own service and Instacart.

Holiday Farms will spend about $1 million to renovate the Woodbury store with new lighting, flooring, fixtures and other features, and the store will have more-upscale décor than the chain’s three existing stores, Mandell said.

A Roslyn resident and Long Island native, Mandell has 30 years of experience in the grocery business, he said.

His six grocery stores include two Key Food stores in Queens and Locust Valley Market in Locust Valley.

The Holiday Farms store in Glen Head is in a space formerly occupied by a Waldbaum’s supermarket, whose parent company, Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2015.

Mandell acquired the store through Staten Island-based Key Food Stores Co-Op Inc., a cooperative of independently owned and operated stores, which bought the Glen Head store in a package deal of 15 stores for $28 million in a bankruptcy auction in 2015.

Woodbury Common has been without a grocery store since The Fresh Market Inc. closed its 4-year-old store there in 2017. (The Greensboro, North Carolina-based specialty retailer’s only other Long Island store is in Smithtown.)

With a grocery store there, "people will come there on a more frequent basis, which helps other stores," said Neal Kaplan, a partner in Kabro Associates, the Woodbury-based real estate firm that owns the shopping center.

Built in 1974, Woodbury Common is an 85,000-square-foot shopping center that historically has offered high-end or boutique shops, but the tenant makeup has changed over the past few years to offer more service-based stores, such as salons and restaurants, he said.

Current tenants include eateries Dirty Taco, Great Harvest Bread Co. and Chop’t, as well as fitness studios StretchLab and SoulCycle.

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.