Planned Wegmans supermarket in Lake Grove eyes 2024 opening
This is an artist rendering of the Wegmans planned for Lake Grove. Credit: Wegmans Food Markets, Inc.
The village of Lake Grove has granted most of the major building approvals needed for Wegmans to begin construction of its first Long Island supermarket in 2023.
The high-end Rochester-based grocer announced in April that it had entered into a deal to buy 8.5 acres of land in a Lake Grove shopping center from Prestige Properties and Development. Wegmans plans to build a 100,000-square-foot supermarket there.
Wegmans expects construction on the grocery store to start after the property purchase closes this spring, and the supermarket to open in 2024.
“It usually takes about a year from the time construction begins to complete the project, so we will have a better idea of an opening date once construction begins,” Wegmans spokeswoman Mandee Puleo said Monday.
Lake Grove granted planning board, zoning board of appeals and village board approvals to Prestige for the grocery store’s construction on Nov. 2, Village Clerk Kara Haufler said Monday.
The project still awaits subdivision approval from Suffolk County to split the Wegmans land from the rest of the shopping center, said Jerry Welkis, president of Welco Realty Inc., the New Rochelle-based real estate firm that represented Prestige in the Wegmans deal.
The subdivision approval is needed before the property sale can close, he said. Building and demolition permits from the village are still needed too, Haufler said.
Manhattan-based Prestige, which owns the 28-acre DSW Plaza at Lake Grove at the corner of Middle Country and Moriches roads, would continue to own and operate the rest of the shopping center after the sale of a slice of the property to Wegmans.
Neither Prestige nor Wegmans is disclosing the property sale price.
The last supermarket in the DSW Plaza was a Fairway Market, which was 2 years old when it closed in July 2016, months after its Manhattan-based parent company’s bankruptcy filing.
But Wegmans would not be taking Fairway’s former space.
Wegmans plans to demolish buildings in the shopping center to make space for its new supermarket. The new construction would include a site that holds an Ashley Furniture store, which will be relocating to another unit in the shopping center. Also, a vacant Babies R Us/Toys R Us space would be demolished as part of the project.
The space that Ashley would relocate to is under renovation, and should be available for the store in early 2023, Welkis said.
Wegmans is popular with consumers — a chain that is "widely viewed as a high-end grocer" yet that "remains within reach by offering high-quality yet affordable own brands," said Rob Weisberg, senior vice president of Incentives and Loyalty at Inmar Intelligence, a retail industry analytics company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
"They excel in customer service and are known for their fresh selections," Weisberg said.
Founded in 1916, Wegmans Food Markets Inc. is a private, family-owned company that operates 109 stores in Washington, D.C., and eight states, including Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Virginia. The company employs 52,000 people and had sales of $11.2 billion in 2021, Wegmans said.
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.
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