Phil Lempert (born April 1953) has been the Food Trends Editor for NBC's Today show since 1991. Known as the "SupermarketGuru", Lempert appears weekly with "New Product Hit's & Misses" on ABC Now and hosts a weekly radio show called Good Day with SupermarketGuru. Lempert is a contributing editor of Winsight Grocery Business , and a content provider for WGB. He has written for Newsday , [1] Family Circle , [2] and Meat & Seafood Merchandising, [3] among other publications. Lempert is the host of the Farm Food Facts, Lost in the Supermarket and Winsight Live podcasts.
Lempert worked at McDonald's and Howard Johnson's in high school, and after graduating Drexel University he worked in his family's food brokerage firm. He then attended Pratt Institute for graduate studies in package design and went on to create Lempert Design, Marketing & Advertising; during this time, Lempert began publishing the bi-weekly The Lempert Report. He went on to become senior vice president of Age Wave a lifestyle consulting firm that focuses on the life path of the baby boomer generation and then joined the Tribune Company as chairman of their food task force and created content for their newspapers, online services and television stations.
Lempert is the Founder and Editor of SupermarketGuru.com, a website with a consumer panel of more than 100,000 opt-in participants nationwide who offer opinions on food and health related issues and products, a food and health news hub created in 1994. As Editor, he produces a weekly "New Product Hit and Miss" segment and publishes e-publications targeted to consumers and businesses: Xtreme Retail23, Food Nutrition & Science, Coffee Chat News and Facts, Figures & the Future.
In 2007, Lempert founded "Phil’s Supermarket," the first supermarket to exist in the virtual world of Second Life.
In 2010, Lempert produced and hosted a documentary called Food Sense with Phil Lempert that aired on U.S. public television stations. [4] The one-hour documentary follows a typical American breakfast of eggs, bacon, orange juice, toast, coffee and strawberries from farm and factory to table. Viewers are introduced to both organic and conventional food production methods and watch how the Mercantile Exchange and other issues impact food prices.
Lempert is the former host of a live call-in syndicated radio show called Shopping Smart and from 1989-2005 he hosted a weekly, live call-in radio show, Before You Bite with Phil Lempert. Lempert was a correspondent for BBC Radio 5 Live Up All Night, a monthly guest on BBC's International Journalists Debate and was a weekly contributor to KCRW’s Good Food program.
Lempert has appeared on The View , Oprah , Discovery Health and Extra and has been profiled and interviewed by USA Today , [5] [6] The New York Times , [7] The Christian Science Monitor , [8] The Philadelphia Inquirer , [9] National Enquirer , [10] Daily News, [11] Newsday , [12] Boston Herald , [13] Ottawa Citizen, [14] and Brandweek . [15]
Lempert is the author of Being the Shopper, Healthy, Wealthy & Wise, Phil Lempert’s Supermarket Shopping & Value Guide, Top Ten Trends for Baby Boomers and Crisis Management: A Workbook for Survival. Lempert also hosts the National Grocers Association annual "Best Bagger Competition."
Lempert is married to Laura B. Gray and resides in Santa Monica, California and New York City.
A supermarket is a self-service shop offering a wide variety of food, beverages and household products, organized into sections. It is larger and has a wider selection than earlier grocery stores, but is smaller and more limited in the range of merchandise than a hypermarket or big-box market.
A grocery store, grocer or grocery shop (UK), is a store primarily engaged in retailing a general range of food products, which may be fresh or packaged. In everyday U.S. usage, however, "grocery store" is a synonym for supermarket, and is not used to refer to other types of stores that sell groceries. In the UK, shops that sell food are distinguished as grocers or grocery shops, though in everyday use, people usually use either the term "supermarket" or, for a smaller type of store that sells groceries, a "corner shop" or "convenience shop".
Save A Lot Food Stores Ltd. is an American discount supermarket chain store headquartered in Earth City, Missouri, in Greater St. Louis. It is a subsidiary of Onex Corporation and has about 1,300 stores across 36 states in the United States with over $4 billion in annual sales.
A hypermarket is a big-box store combining a supermarket and a department store. The result is an expansive retail facility carrying a wide range of products under one roof, including full grocery lines and general merchandise. In theory, hypermarkets allow customers to satisfy all their routine shopping needs in one trip. The term hypermarket was coined in 1968 by French trade expert Jacques Pictet.
An Asian supermarket is a category of grocery stores in Western countries that stocks items imported from the multiple countries in East, South and Southeast Asia. Supermarkets in Asia generally have no equivalent to the "Asian" supermarkets of the West; foodstuffs in each respective Asian country have vastly different regulations and supply chains from one another, so stores are localized for each country's tastes and only carry locally approved items for that market. Examples of this: seaweed snacks, originate in Japan where they are salty or savory, in Thailand they are often spicy and locally produced.
Safeway is an American supermarket chain founded by Marion Barton Skaggs in April 1915 in American Falls, Idaho. The chain provides grocery items, food and general merchandise and feature a variety of specialty departments, such as bakery, delicatessen, floral and pharmacy, as well as Starbucks coffee shops and fuel centers. It is a subsidiary of Albertsons after being acquired by private equity investors led by Cerberus Capital Management in January 2015. Safeway's primary base of operations is in the west with some stores located in the Mid-Atlantic region of the Eastern Seaboard. The subsidiary is headquartered in Pleasanton, California, with its parent company, Albertsons, headquartered in Boise, Idaho.
A discount store or discounter offers a retail format in which products are sold at prices that are in principle lower than an actual or supposed "full retail price". Discounters rely on bulk purchasing and efficient distribution to keep down costs.
The Stop & Shop Supermarket Company, known as Stop & Shop, is a chain of supermarkets located in the northeastern United States. From its beginnings in 1892 as a small grocery store, it has grown to include 415 stores chain-wide.
Bloom was a chain of mid-grade American grocery stores operated by Food Lion established in 2004. The parent company of Food Lion, The Delhaize Group, announced in January 2012 that it was discontinuing the Bloom brand. Bloom's headquarters were in Salisbury, North Carolina.
Legal Sea Foods is an American restaurant chain of casual-dining seafood restaurants mostly located in the Northeastern region of the United States.
The Penn Fruit Company was a regional grocery chain in the Philadelphia and Baltimore areas that operated from 1927 until 1978. During the firm's history it was regarded as one of the most innovative American supermarket chains. However, the company's innovations often were copied by its bigger rivals who eventually succeeded in causing the chain's demise.
The Giant Company is an American supermarket chain that operates stores in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. The chain operates full-scale supermarkets under the Giant and Martin's banners along with small-scale urban stores under the Giant Heirloom Market banner. Giant is a subsidiary of Ahold Delhaize USA, which also owns similarly-named Giant Food of Landover, Maryland, often known as Giant-Landover; to distinguish from that chain, whose stores also operate under the Giant banner, The GIANT Company is often referred to as Giant-Carlisle or Giant/Martin's. A significant difference between the two chains is that Giant-Landover is unionized while Giant-Carlisle is non-union, with the exception of stores in Lewistown and Burnham, Pennsylvania. As of September 2020, the company operated 190 stores, 132 pharmacies, 105 fuel stations and 125 grocery pickup hubs.
Omni Superstore was a chain of supermarkets in the Chicago area and was owned by Dominick's. In 1997, Dominick's phased out Omni and converted the stores into Dominick's because the concept was not generating enough revenue compared to other Dominick's stores.
Redner's Markets, Inc. is a privately held, American supermarket chain headquartered in Reading, Pennsylvania. Redner's is an employee-owned company that is wholly owned by present and past employees and members of the Redner family. Redner's operates stores throughout Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. The chain has a distribution warehouse located in Maidencreek Township, Pennsylvania.
Pick-N-Pay Supermarkets was a chain of supermarkets which operated in the Greater Cleveland, Ohio area. The company's origin can be traced to the year 1928 and the opening of a small dairy store in Cleveland Heights, Ohio by Edward Silverberg who then expanded his operation and created a chain of such stores which he called Farmview Creamery Stores. In 1938, Mr. Silverberg opened a supermarket on E. 185th Street which he called Pick-N-Pay. In 1940, he changed the name of all his stores to Pick-N-Pay Supermarkets. He grew the chain to a total of 10 stores and in 1951 sold the company to Cook Coffee Company. Under Cook Coffee's ownership, the chain continued to grow through expansion and through Pick-N-Pay's acquisition of the Foodtown supermarkets in 1959. In 1972, it was sold to a group of private investors led by Julius Kravitz, who continued the use of the brand for the newly independent company. Principal competitors in the Greater Cleveland market were the Fisher-Fazio-Costa, Stop-N-Shop, and Heinen's grocery chains.
Babita Sharma is an Indian British television newsreader on BBC News and BBC World News, presenting the Newsday strand each Monday to Wednesday from London with Rico Hizon in Singapore.
In marketing, premiums are promotional items — toys, collectables, souvenirs and household products — that are linked to a product, and often require proofs of purchase such as box tops or tokens to acquire. The consumer generally has to pay at least the shipping and handling costs to receive the premium. Premiums are sometimes referred to as prizes, although historically the word "prize" has been used to denote an item that is packaged with the product and requires no additional payment over the cost of the product.
Hannaford is a supermarket chain based in Scarborough, Maine. Founded in Portland, Maine, in 1883, Hannaford operates stores in New England and New York. The chain is now part of the Ahold Delhaize group based in the Netherlands.
Best Market was a family-owned, regional supermarket chain with 30 stores in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The company was headquartered in Bethpage, New York, and has been owned by the Raitses family since the company's first store opened in Lake Ronkonkoma, New York in 1994.
The retail format influences the consumer's store choice and addresses the consumer's expectations. At its most basic level, a retail format is a simple marketplace, that is; a location where goods and services are exchanged. In some parts of the world, the retail sector is still dominated by small family-run stores, but large retail chains are increasingly dominating the sector, because they can exert considerable buying power and pass on the savings in the form of lower prices. Many of these large retail chains also produce their own private labels which compete alongside manufacturer brands. Considerable consolidation of retail stores has changed the retail landscape, transferring power away from wholesalers and into the hands of the large retail chains.