Ask a New Yorker puts Fairway Market as the reader’s choice and the favorite food shopping experience in New York. Apparently California imports just aren’t cutting it for the long haul as New Yorker’s say Fairway is the one food market they can rely on for fresh and affordable produce. Why? Well it seems while Whole Foods has been keeping customer’s sort of happy on the West side, the Whole Foods East Side store is not living up to the brands name. According to reports, produce isn’t consistently available, staff attitude problems, and over all New Yorker’s prefer Fairway Market. Indeed, our own investigation reveals that when it comes to price Fairway does the right thing hands down! Ask Fairway why they seem to have the winning recipe and their formula has a great science behind it. They looked to Europe for style and relied on US professionalism. The company considers itself an amusement park of food and a place they believe you will find all your favorite markets under one roof. Fairways aim is to provide the feel of the great markets of Fouchon (Paris) or La Boqueria (Spain) and all without the airfare. Sounds like a plan and one which according to our readers seems to work. Not bad for a business that started out as a vegetable stand. But maybe because it is homegrown in New York it knows what locals and tourists enjoy.The history of Fairway is itself a great New York story. Started in 1933 by Nathan Glickberg who founded a small fruit and vegetable stand simply to support his family it has grown and grown. By 1954, New Yorker’s were loving the produce and Nathan and his son, Leo, partnered to create the beginnings of the first store at 74th St. and Broadway. At this time they decided to rename the Business and Leo’s wife (Cynthia) suggested using the name Fairway because her own father had successfully operated a business under that name. She felt it was a lucky name. Boy was she right! In 1974, after having grown up learning the family trade, Leo’s son, Howie Glickberg, came into the business. Howie had a bigger dream and larger vision of growing Fairway. It seemed possible but there was work to do. Howie inherited sawdust covered wooden floors, item racks supported by milk crates, and a square footage that only had room for four cash registers. Yet, with his New York determination he rose to the challenge. With an extraordinary work ethic, Howie wasted no time looking for opportunities to expand, and soon Fairway lived up to its slogan “LIKE NO OTHER MARKET,” He then brought in two partners, Harold Seybert and David Sneddon, and together the three of them catapulted Fairway well beyond anything that Howie’s grandfather, Nathan, could have imagined. Fairway went from being an unassuming Upper West Side, one storefrontShop that offered the best values on fruits and vegetables and penny candy out of self-service bins built into a wall which the neighborhood truly loved to a company that brought in traditional groceries a long with specialty items. The company started hiring the crew of ambitious, hardworking foodies who would one day become Fairway’s experts, department heads, and vice presidents. The rest as they say is history.Fairway then took over the space next door, and by the mid-1980s talk of Fairway Market was all over town and beyond. It seemed logical. Fairway was always first to offer unique, different, imported, things-you-didn’t-know-existed foodstuffs. The low prices captured lots of attention and the new-and-improved product offering earned a new-found respect. Newspapers, magazines, foodies and the like could not stop writing and raving about it.In 2006, having achieved a great deal of success, Howie’s two partners were ready to retire. This put Howie in the market for a new partner that could help him further realize his business dreams. Lucky for New Yorkers He found one. Sterling Investment Partners, based in Westport, CT, invests in middle-market Businesses that have strong, sustainable competitive advantages and growth potential and Fairway fitted the bill. They also shared an aggressive growth vision with Howie, Sterling announced they had taken a majority ownership in Fairway Market in early 2007. Together, Charles Santoro, managing partner/co-founder of Sterling and chairman of Fairway, Howie Glickberg, Vice Chairman of Development and third generation owner, and a team of seasoned managers, accelerated Fairway’s new store openings to two per year. By the end of 2011, Fairway Market had expanded to nine stores, and the number of people employed was approximately 3,500. Herb Ruetsch, who had joined Fairway Market in 1998 as its Chief Financial Officer, was appointed the Chief Executive Officer in January 2012. All the hard work did not go unnoticed. Fairway Market has achieved excellence and recognition as an industry leader and won countless awards. In fact Fairway has been winning numerous awards since 2004, and continues to do so.In 2010, Fairway Market was recognized as one of the Top 50 Retailers by The Gourmet Retailer. In June 2011, Fairway won the Real Estate Board of New York’s (REBNY) 2010 Retail Deal of the Year Award for “Deal that Most Benefits Manhattan.” In January 2012, Fairway was voted Best Supermarket on Long Island in the “Best of L.I.” Long Island Press poll and now in 2013 voted number 1 by Ask a New Yorker readers. Though as much as the company changes it also stays the same and despite the rapid growth, the things that are constant is the desire to keep Fairway Market as true to its entrepreneurial and customer-focused roots as Possible. The company also never wants to lose sight of all of the things that makes Fairway unique and special to millions of people each year: being the first to carry or import something new and delicious, sky-high piles of daily-delivered produce, a best of the best kosher selection, the freshest seafood, custom-cut USDA Prime meat from their Butcher Shop, an immense variety of organic and natural foods and products in every category, one-stop shopping with a full assortment of traditional groceries at fantastic values, the only market to roast hand-selected coffee beans of the highest quality on premises, an overall selection that all other grocery stores are absolutely envious of, and trained team members who are incredibly passionate and knowledgeable about food. Their coffee operation is particularly impressive, and when asked about how Fairway became coffee expert’s owner Howie Glickberg Says: “It’s like everything else we do in the store. Whenever we bring a new product into the store, or a new department into the store, we become experts at it.” And that just about sums it up from a small acorn this New York legend has grown and grown and just like their coffee beans New Yorkers are loving it!
