Most shoppers who enter the seafood department of a Stew Leonard’s store do a double take. It does not look like the typical supermarket seafood space; instead, it appears more like a huge fresh fish market within the store. Each of the Norwalk, Conn.-based company’s four stores features as many as 50 feet of fresh fish cases that take four hours to set up daily.
The stores’ seafood managers handle only seafood — instead of doing double duty in also overseeing the meat department — and are longtime employees, as some have worked at the company for up to 25 years. The managers — and many of the seafood department staff — are true fishmongers who have been involved in the business from a young age.
“The majority of our fish is bought whole, then cut in house. Each department has a minimum of three people who know how to cut fish and we have professional people running our department,” says Doug Goodman, seafood manager for Stew Leonard’s Yonkers, N.Y., store.
Similar to a fish market, all of the chain’s fish is bought fresh and shipped in daily. “A lot of chains buy in bulk, then sell it until it is gone. We would rather run out at the end of the day, then re-stock it the next day,” says Goodman.
The biggest trends that Goodman and Fred Papp, seafood manager of the retailer’s Norwalk store, have seen over the past year or more include growing demand for whole fish, local fish and a wider variety of oysters.
“Our customers want to support the local area and the United States. We try to buy as much local product as we can, from up and down the Eastern seaboard,” says Goodman. While customers have always been interested in buying local to some extent, the trend has taken off over the past five years, since country of origin labeling laws went into effect. “It has opened people’s eyes to where their products are coming from. With the economy today, people want to support the United States,” says Goodman.
Click here to read the rest of the feature on Stew Leonard’s. Written by SeaFood Business and SeafoodSource Contributing Editor Christine Blank, the story appeared in the magazine’s June issue.
