Wild Oats Meets Stop & Shop

PLYMOUTH, MA-Wild Oats, the retailer of natural foods and other products, has opened its first department within a Stop & Shop grocery store here, and the company plans to open four more in the supermarket chain’s Northeastern units by the end of the year. Its entry into the supermarkets comes at a time when Wild Oats is trying to make a push into the region.

Boulder, CO-based Wild Oats only currently has a handful of its own stores in the Northeast, two in Connecticut, three in the Boston area and one in Princeton, NJ. The store-within-a-store concept with Stop & Shop could help expose customers to the Wild Oats brand, Sonja Tuitele, a company spokeswoman, tells GSR. “We thought it was a great fit because we don’t have a lot of store density in the Northeast,” she says.

The retailer would also consider further expansion into other Stop & Shop units (the grocer has 360 Northeastern stores) if the partnership proves successful. Wild Oats executives will also look at other metro markets where the chain does not have a large brick and mortar presence, Tuitele says. The potential is there for quite a few partnerships since the company only has 111 stores in 24 states and is looking to have a total of 450 units across the country.