Wegmans supermarket and restaurants/prepared foods

Many supermarket chains are moving heavily into the prepared foods segment because increasingly, Americans don't cook.  Prepared foods purchased at the supermarket (or Korean market in NYC) allows people to still eat at home without cooking.  Although USA Today reports in "Millennials are eating out less," that younger demographics are eating out less.


Pizza station, Whole Foods Market, Austin.  

Whole Foods Market in particular is known for the prepared foods sections and in newer locations, cooked food stations such as for pizza, dinner, or Mexican foods.  (The Tustin store in Orange County, California is particularly resplendent for prepared foods.)

On the east coast, this is something that Richmond's former Ukrops chain was known for in terms of leadership in the market.  The chain has since been sold and consolidated into the Martins Supermarket chain. 

Harris-Teeter, a North Carolina based supermarket company expanding aggressively in the Washington Metropolitan area, is another firm with such positioning, as is Wegmans, which is based in Rochester, New York, but has been moving south into the Mid-Atlantic market, steadily opening stores in the Baltimore and Washington metropolitan areas.

Wegmans is taking up prepared foods another notch, with its "Pub restaurant and bar," an Irish-pub-style restaurant, which also helps the company's positioning for the sale of high margin beer, wine, and spirits. 

They have three of these pubs open, in King of Prussia, Collegeville and Malvern, with a fourth coming to Allentown, Pennsylvania.  Likely they will move to import this concept to the Baltimore-Washington region. 

See this story from last year "Pub coming to Allentown Wegmans: Chain's first bar in the Valley is centerpiece of Tilghman Street expansion" and this update on the progress of construction from the Allentown Morning Call.