Walmart seeks town approval to enlarge Riverhead store into supercenter, 1 of 3 planned for LI

Walmart expects to finish enlarging its Riverhead store into a supercenter, with an added grocery store, by next spring, according to plans submitted to the town.

The Riverhead store is one of three existing Long Island stores, including those in Islandia and East Meadow, for which Walmart has submitted plans to municipalities since early 2025 to enlarge the locations into supercenters.

With the planned Long Island expansion projects, the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer is aiming to grab a larger slice of grocery spending on the Island. Walmart is the largest grocer nationwide by far, but on Long Island, Stop & Shop ranks first.

“With the potential to expand our existing Islandia and Riverhead stores into supercenters, we are excited about the opportunity to bring expanded grocery offerings, services, and new career opportunities to the community,” Walmart spokeswoman Mariel Messier said in an email Monday.

She declined to comment on the East Meadow store.

Walmart Inc. has 14 stores on Long Island, including a Sam’s Club warehouse store in Medford; a Neighborhood Market, which is a grocery store, in Levittown; and three supercenters.

In February, Walmart representatives attended a “pre-submission conference” with Riverhead’s planning department staff, who gave feedback on the parking, landscaping and building changes proposed for the Riverhead store, and discussed sewer and health department requirements, Newsday previously reported.

Based on that feedback, Walmart submitted a site plan application to the planning department on May 12 that states the 155,760-square-foot store would be expanded by 15% to 178,400 square feet. Among the upgrades would be improvements to landscaping and lighting, and the addition of 12 electric-vehicle charging stations.

For Walmart to move forward with its Riverhead project, the retailer must receive site plan approval from the town’s planning board, along with approvals from the Suffolk County Department of Public Works, Suffolk County Department of Health Services and two town agencies, Greg Bergman, senior planner for the Town of Riverhead, said in an email.

Walmart’s Riverhead store, at 1890 Old Country Rd. in Gateway Plaza, opened in 2014. The store was a relocation of a smaller store that opened in 2001 on Old Country Road.

Walmart’s store in the Islandia Shopping Center, at 1850 Veterans Memorial Hwy., opened in January 2003.

This past January, Islandia’s village board granted approval for a site plan to enlarge that store by 46,598 square feet, or roughly 36%, to a total of 175,353 square feet, as well as add a new drive-thru pharmacy.

There is no definitive timeline for the expansion project’s construction, according to Jon Cohen, vice president of Blumenfeld Development Group in Syosset, the developer that co-owns the Islandia Shopping Center.

“With site plan approval, we now have the ability to move forward but the multiple details that need to be coordinated with Walmart and other tenants slated for the property will consume much of the summer,” Cohen said in an email Monday.

Walmart opened its East Meadow store at 2465 Hempstead Tpke. in Clearmeadow Plaza in January 2002.

Last August, the retailer submitted plans to the Town of Hempstead to enlarge the East Meadow store by incorporating the space next door that a Stop & Shop supermarket vacated in October 2024.

The store’s size would increase by 63,300 square feet, or 54%, to 180,526 square feet.

On Feb. 4, Hempstead Town’s Board of Zoning Appeals approved Walmart’s request for parking and sign variances, which are deviations from zoning regulations. One of the variances was for a 28% reduction in the number of parking spaces required, from 1,066 down to 765, because electric vehicle charging stations and more shopping cart corrals would be added to the site.

The site plan for the East Meadow Walmart project will not be approved until the town's building department does a building code review, and that has not been scheduled yet, town spokesman Casey Sammon said Tuesday.

Kenneth Breslin, president of Breslin Realty Development Corp., a Garden City-based company that co-owns Clearmeadow Plaza, declined to comment.

Stop & Shop still holds the lease to its vacant space in East Meadow, at 2525 Hempstead Tpke., but the grocer is "unable to provide any additional details regarding the timing of its conclusion," spokesman Daniel Wolk said in an email Tuesday.

Gaining from groceries

First launched by Walmart in 1988, supercenters are set up to be one-stop shopping destinations that include full-service supermarkets, clothing, home furnishings and electronics, as well as specialty shops, such as nail and hair salons, and fast-food restaurants.

Supercenters are Walmart’s preferred store format, partly because groceries are the biggest contributor to its profits. Groceries accounted for 59% of Walmart’s $483 billion in total U.S. net sales in its fiscal year 2026.

Among Walmart Inc.'s 5,215 U.S. stores, about 68% are supercenters, 13% are Walmart neighborhood markets, 12% are Sam’s Club warehouse stores and 7% are regular Walmart discount stores.

In the first quarter of this year, Walmart held the largest national market share for grocery sales, 19.9%, among all types of food retailers, including dollar and convenience stores, according to Numerator, a Chicago-based market research firm.

But on Long Island, Stop & Shop dominates the grocery segment.

Quincy, Massachusetts-based Stop & Shop has 46 Long Island stores, accounting for 16.57% of the market share on the Island, where Walmart, ranking seventh, has 5.69%, according to Food Trade News, a Columbia, Maryland-based publication.

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.