BY MICHELE HERMAN | Mrs. Green’s, the new natural and organic grocery store that’s been under construction seemingly forever on Hudson and Bank Sts., opened its doors this Monday. The papered-over windows with the marketing puns have come down, revealing a sparkling new store on the site of the tired, old Gristedes.
Meanwhile, we far West Villagers are madly trying to figure out Mrs. Green’s M.O., speculating about how it might change our daily routines and affect our already precariously balanced retail ecosystem.
Is Mrs. Green’s more of a mini-Whole Foods, or more a maxi-Elm Health? Will it threaten the life of D’Ag, which is, for better or worse, our only full-service supermarket? Will it knock out our health-food stores and mom-and-pop drug store? Will it drive prices up or down at the Saturday Abingdon Square Greenmarket? Will it mean that everyone can stop schlepping to Chelsea for food? For those who don’t cook much, the big question is whether Mrs. Green’s will provide a viable alternative to ordering in. For those who do cook: Will it sell ingredients we can use at a price we can afford?
The press party last week had a jazz band, a lot of very friendly staffers — including the resident wellness adviser — samples, and some incredibly heavy goody bags. But it didn’t answer any of the above questions because the food was not yet on the shelves; only time will tell.
Some things are clear now: The store is big, so it can potentially fulfill a lot of competing desires: 6,000 square feet of prepared foods and health/wellness products on the ground floor, plus another 6,000 of produce, meat, seafood, frozen food and dairy in the basement. The prepared-foods counter is extremely long, maybe the longest I’ve seen. The store has a slightly rustic feel, with rough reclaimed wood at the checkouts. I was surprised by the large selection of health-food-store supplements and toiletries, including some familiar ones, like Dessert Essence and Natracare, and some I’d never heard of, like Dr. Woods and Goddess Garden. I was disappointed not to see the one hard-to-find health-food product my family swears by, Nature’s Gate toothpaste. But Laurie Rocke, Mrs. Green’s customer engagement manager, assured me she would look into stocking it.
The abundant food we sampled was mostly local, although the prosciutto was from, of all places, Iowa, and my husband and I had a good laugh with the rep as we imagined Hillary Clinton sampling it at the state fair. The cheeses were all rich and flavorful. The falafel was good. I was unimpressed by the chocolate mousse pie, with a taste and mouth feel that struck me as too aggressively healthy, and my husband declared the three-ingredient sorbet watery.
To learn more about the chain and the new store, I spoke with David Kiser, the promotions manager. Mrs. Green’s has 14 stores, one in Canada, two in Illinois and the rest in Westchester, Putnam and Fairfield Counties. The business was founded in Scarsdale in 1991, and is headquartered in Irvington. New stores are on the way in Rye and Dobbs Ferry, and they are scouting out additional New York City locations. It’s a little hard to pin the company down because the mission statement is replete with feel-good language, like “clean, healthy food.” Here are a few definites: The produce is organic, everything is preservative free, there’s a money-back guarantee, and whenever possible Mrs. Green’s “supports local farmers and [food] artisans and buys from suppliers who practice sustainability.”
Kiser stressed the chain’s long-standing relationships with Hudson Valley farmers, though he also said that Mrs. Green’s uses a middleman distributor.
“We don’t want to sell stuff that’s just O.K.,” he told me. “We want to sell what’s best right now, when it’s plentiful and flavorful. Right now we have an abundance of yellow and green summer squash. Because there’s so much, we get a good price.”
Last week, he said, the Jersey peaches were in, but now the New York ones are coming, and will be sold first in the new store.
“We would so rather have a local product where we know the farmer, how he grows it, how he takes care of it,” he said. “It’s so much better than shipping across the country.”
I asked about corn, which is tough for city dwellers because it loses its sweetness so rapidly. He said that there’s about a day between harvest, warehouse and store, and that it’s kept at the optimal temperature during transit. Fish comes via the distributor Scandia based in Secaucus, N.J. Some of the products will be tailored specifically for the new store: the Stumptown Coffee, the Beecher’s cheese that’s made in the Flatiron District, the Sohha savory yogurt.
Me, I like a store with a nice ugly weekly circular full of numbers like “$1.99” and “2 for 1.” I was impressed by the prices in this week’s circular on their Web site, which Kiser assures me will be in force at the new store. My household doesn’t usually buy organic because it’s just too expensive, so I was heartened by the prices on the organic Hudson Valley produce, all of them either comparable to or cheaper than what we can buy at the Greenmarket or the Manhattan Fruit Exchange in Chelsea Market.
I did an in-store comparison of a dozen Mrs. Green’s sale items with Trader Joe’s and D’Agostino — peaches/nectarines, summer squash, corn, kale, leaf lettuce, slicing tomatoes, ribeye, drumsticks, boneless chicken breasts, oats, fresh mozzarella and Parmigiano-Reggiano. Mrs. Green’s beat the others most of the time. D’Ag had peaches and nectarines on sale, but they were not organic, came from California and were the same price, $2.49, as Mrs. Green’s local organic ones. D’Ag’s ribeye was $21.99, Trader Joe’s $15.99 and Mrs. Green’s $13.99. Mrs. Green’s parmigiano beat D’Ag’s hands-down: $15.99 to $21.99, but Trader Joe’s was $13.99, and the Italian import store in Chelsea Market is cheaper than all of them. The two best bargains I saw in the circular: organic oats and organic chicken drumsticks, both for $1.99 a pound.
When I got home from the press party last week, I rummaged through the canvas goody bag, so heavy because of the five plastic beverage bottles inside, most of them containing water fortified with something or other — electrolytes or minerals or high pH or berry flavor. The bag, which I don’t need because I have a dozen other such giveaway bags, had a tag dangling from the strap proclaiming that it was responsibly sourced, with smaller print noting that it contains a chemical known to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Considering the fact that Mrs. Green’s is all about clean food, I felt surprisingly dirty. I wished I hadn’t taken it. Even more, I wished I could wave a wand and make all this stuff not exist in the first place, make Americans with disposable income less susceptible to snake oil. One of the water bottles actually said it was gluten-free. Stop and think for a minute: If you put gluten in water you end up with wheat paste. One of the bottles was so durable and so svelte in its curves, I imagined frontier people or bush dwellers coming upon one and building a shrine to worship it, never imagining a culture in which people might buy one of these every day of the week and toss it without a thought.
What else was in the bag? A weighty, seedy chocolate-chip cookie wrapped in Saran that I found chewy in all the wrong ways. A lot of skin-care samples, including a My-Chelle exfoliant made of sugar that I’m enjoying because it’s so concentrated and smells delicious. A sample of a painkiller made from turmeric that sounds intriguing and a packet of super green food that doesn’t. A small chocolate bar fortified with probiotics. Two kinds of granola, a natural inhaler, and a snack called pretzel “shells” — presumably for people who can’t be bothered to chew on pretzel innards.
I’d happily trade all of this stuff for one perfectly ripe organic Hudson Valley beefsteak tomato. And if Mrs. Green’s can offer me that tomato for $1.99 a pound in August, when tomatoes are plentiful and at their peak of flavor, I’m sold.
