Whole Foods to Open Mini “Daily Shop” Stores in New York

City dwellers are about to start seeing some half-sized Whole Foods in their neighborhood.

The Amazon-owned grocery chain announced today that it will begin opening up new “small-format” stores, called Whole Foods Market Daily Shop, for quick trips in several urban markets, beginning with a Manhattan location this fall.

According to Bloomberg, the stores will range between 7,000 to 14,000 square feet in size – compared to about 40,000 square feet for an average full-sized Whole Foods location. The Daily Shops will still come complete with cashiers and self-checkout stations, but will have a smaller product assortment emphasizing the Whole Foods 365 brand as well as fresh produce, pre-packaged meals, alcohol, frozen foods, meat and seafood, and “local specialties,” CSP reported.

The first Daily Shop location is planned to open this fall at 1175 Third Avenue in the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, and Amazon has signed five leases in New York City, with plans to look at additional cities across the country later.

“The introduction of home delivery has changed customers’ mentality. People want things fast,” Christina Minardi, EVP of growth and development at Whole Foods Market and Amazon, told Bloomberg.

In addition to traditional checkout methods, the stores will also make use of Amazon One, the company’s palm print recognition system for an even quicker checkout process.

If the Daily Shop sounds a little familiar, you’re not wrong. Whole Foods previously experimented with the same concept, under the same name, in 2019. That store was just 2,500 square feet and located in New York.

The expansion is just the latest move in Amazon’s increased focus on growing within the grocery space. In 2020, the company launched its Amazon Fresh stores, which feature lower priced products. That chain now has about 44 locations nationwide, as of last year, in addition to the more than 530 global Whole Foods locations it operates.