Erewhon, the luxury supermarket chain that turned grocery shopping into a hyper-trendy Los Angeles lifestyle, is ramping up its pace of expansion.
The company will move into three new cities in 2025: Manhattan Beach, West Hollywood and Glendale.
It’s the most store openings in a single year since owners Tony and Josephine Antoci bought Erewhon in 2011, a sign of the organic grocer’s soaring popularity. And after relocating its central kitchen to a much larger industrial space last month, the company says it has the capacity to grow even more around Southern California.
“We see 2025 as the beginning of Erewhon 2.0 — a wave of expansion for us,” said Tony, who is chief executive.
The Manhattan Beach store will be Erewhon’s first in the South Bay and is scheduled to open in March in a former Mother’s Market & Kitchen at 1700 Rosecrans Ave. After that, the West Hollywood store is set to debut over the summer at 8550 Santa Monica Blvd. in a space that was previously a Sprouts. The Glendale store is expected to open toward the end of the year at the site of the old Virgil’s Hardware Home Center at 520 N. Glendale Ave.
Erewhon currently operates 10 markets, all of them in affluent areas of Los Angeles County. Its Palisades store, which survived the Palisades fire, is temporarily closed.
To support the addition of three new locations — and particularly the in-store cafes that have become core to Erewhon’s business — the company recently completed a three-year buildout of a new central kitchen in Vernon, which at 65,000 square feet is five times larger than its previous one in Boyle Heights.
Known as the commissary, the kitchen is where all of Erewhon’s TikTok-famous hot bar and tonic bar menu items — buffalo cauliflower, coconut chicken tenders, kale salads and gluten-free coconut chaga brownies — are prepped before being delivered to its grocery stores around 5 every morning.
Unlike at traditional supermarket chains, Erewhon has cultivated a following of shoppers who visit daily to grab a prepared meal or one of its celebrity-backed $20 smoothies. The privately held company declined to share financial figures, but said its all-day cafes take up roughly 30% of floor space and serve 100,000 customers every week.
In a 2021 interview with The Times, Tony said about 40% of the company’s revenue came from its prepared foods and private-label products. Erewhon reportedly pulls in $1,800 to $2,500 in sales per square foot; the industry average is $500 per square foot.
As Erewhon has increased its footprint around Los Angeles County, it has expanded and relocated its commissary every few years to keep up.
Roughly 350 of Erewhon’s 2,500 employees work out of the new 110,000-square-foot Vernon building. The commissary takes up more than half of the leased space and includes a bakery, juice room, pasta room, dry storage and production areas, a research and development kitchen and a training kitchen for the stores’ culinary managers. The rest of the building is being used as office space.
“It’s raising the ceiling of what we can accomplish,” said Tony, who called the commissary the “engine” of the business. “That means more variety, more consistency and more innovation.”
Erewhon didn’t start out as a premium grocer. It was founded in 1966 by Japanese immigrants Michio and Aveline Kushi, pioneers of the natural-foods macrobiotic movement who began selling imported organic goods such as brown rice, miso, soy sauce and umeboshi out of their Boston home. After the health department shut it down, the couple rented a small storefront nearby and named it Erewhon, an anagram of “nowhere.”
Erewhon grew to three stores and a distribution facility on the East Coast, and in 1969, the company opened a location in L.A. on Beverly Boulevard. The stores changed owners several times, and eventually the East Coast side of the business was folded into another grocery chain after a period of financial and management struggles.
When the Antocis bought the company for an undisclosed price 14 years ago, only one store remained and its cafe offerings were cooked on site, which limited the couple’s ability to open new locations.
The Antocis have embraced L.A.’s culture and used it to build a cultlike devotion among A-list stars and social media influencers, who have propelled many of its products into viral sensations.
To build upon the buzz, Erewhon has branched out beyond just selling groceries.
Its fast-growing private-label line now includes Erewhon-branded apparel, bags, candles, nutritional supplements and bath and body products.
And its membership program has grown to roughly 50,000 people who pay $100 to $200 annually for special pricing, perks such as free drinks and access to its “lifestyle collective,” an array of discounts from resorts, workout studios, spas and athleisure brands.
The company also recently expanded its shipping range for non-perishable items, like a jar of sea moss gel for $88 or a logo hoodie for $185, to a total of 19 countries.
But fans from around the U.S. continue to push for physical stores in other regions, which Tony said is “a major focal point for us.”
A store in New York, he added, is “absolutely on our radar.” In order to do so, the company would first need to build an East Coast commissary similar to the one in Vernon, he said.
“For the immediate future, we’re focusing on Southern California.”
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