Former Amazon Fresh supermarket on Long Island to become Whole Foods

A Long Island space will be among the former Amazon Fresh supermarkets that will get new life as Whole Foods Markets.

The former Fresh store in Oceanside, at 3620 Long Beach Rd., will become a Whole Foods, spokeswoman Carrie Rodgers Hunte said in an email Friday.

Seattle-based ecommerce giant Amazon.com announced in January it would be closing its 57 remaining Fresh stores in eight states, including the Oceanside and East Setauket stores, and turning some of them into Whole Foods. The Fresh chain had struggled with profitability for years.

Hunte did not respond to Newsday’s inquiries about when the Oceanside store will open as a Whole Foods, how many people will work there or how many former Fresh stores in total will become Whole Foods.

Amazon, which is still paying rent on the 47,300-square-foot space in an Oceanside shopping center, has notified the landlord that it has assigned its lease for the site to its wholly owned subsidiary, Whole Foods, said Joseph Scimone, a managing member of Lighthouse Realty Partners LLC. Lighthouse manages the shopping center for the landlord, Serota Properties in Valley Stream.

"The [shopping] center is fully leased and doing well. Once the Whole Foods opens, it should be even more busy. Whole Foods should be very good for the neighborhood and, of course, the center," Scimone said. 

Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods, a high-end, natural and organic foods grocer, has eight stores on Long Island, including one that opened in March at The Shops at SunVet in Holbrook.

Three Amazon Fresh stores operated in New York State, and all were all on Long Island.

The Oceanside store, the chain's first in the state, opened in July 2022; the East Setauket store opened in October 2024, and the Plainview store closed in September, less than a year after its October 2024 opening. 

Vying for more grocery dollars

Amazon opened its first Fresh store in Woodland Hills, California, in 2020.

Fresh stores allowed customers to pay digitally without going through traditional checkout lanes.

The stores also had traditional and self-checkout lanes.

With Fresh, Amazon was attempting to compete more with discounter Walmart, which has long dominated the supermarket industry as the top grocery retailer in the nation, retail experts said.

But Fresh stores struggled with profitability for years, and about two dozen closed in the United States and the United Kingdom before Amazon pulled the plug on all Fresh stores early this year.

Before the Fresh shutdown, Amazon tried to improve the grocery chain’s performance.

Amazon CEO and President Andy Jassy told analysts in February 2023 the company had decided over that last year that it was pausing the openings of new stores until it had "an equation with differentiation and economic value that we like."

The openings of the East Setauket and Plainview stores were part of the pause.

Amazon revamped the Fresh concept by expanding the grocery selection, lowering prices and changing the technology customers used to shop.

Fresh stores rolled out Dash Carts, which are "smart" shopping carts with screens that show running cost totals. Customers scanned bar codes of products using cameras on the carts, and then exited the stores through Dash Cart lanes that charged them using the payment method linked to their accounts.

Fresh store openings resumed in summer 2024 but more closings followed.

In January, Amazon announced it was closing its remaining 57 Amazon Fresh brick-and-mortar grocery stores in eight states, including California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Virginia, as the company planned to focus on expanding online grocery delivery and its Whole Foods chain.

Amazon also shut down its 14 Amazon Go convenience stores in California, Illinois, Washington State and New York. None were on Long Island. 

The convenience stores allowed customers to pay digitally without going to cashiers. 

Some of the closing Fresh stores were to be transitioned into Whole Foods stores, Amazon said in January.

Amazon, which has 538 Whole Foods stores in the United States, and 12 each in Canada and the United Kingdom, plans to open 100 more over the next few years.

Amazon doesn't disclose Whole Foods' sales but it does disclose sales for its brick-and-mortar stores, the vast majority of which are Whole Foods.

Amazon's brick-and-mortar stores' net sales were $5.8 billion in the second quarter of this year, a 4% increase from the same period last year.

Whole Foods is performing better than the overall grocery segment, said Joe Feldman, a senior managing director focusing on retail at the Telsey Advisory Group, a Manhattan-based brokerage firm.

"They serve a more-affluent consumer who has the ability to spend on groceries and buy what they want. And, so, they're well positioned," he said.

Whole Foods has lowered its prices to be more competitive as some middle-class consumers become more sensitive to inflation, he said.

"They're also leveraging their Whole Foods [stores] to help service ... their Amazon Fresh orders that are done online, so their pricing's been a little better than it used to be. It's still not Walmart prices, but it's better," Feldman 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.