Uncle Giuseppe's eyes more expansion, as it opens a Long Island supermarket this week and plans 2 others for next year

When two brothers and a business partner opened an East Meadow Farms produce store in 1998, they had big hopes for the small location.

They started with 20 employees in a 7,800-square-foot store.

In 2001, the store was rebranded as Uncle Giuseppe’s Marketplace, named after an uncle of brothers Carl and Philip DelPrete, who had partnered with Tom Barresi to open the specialty Italian market.

The Bronx-raised DelPrete brothers, who grew up working in their Italian-immigrant father’s butcher shop in Manhattan, tried to bring some of the charm of an old-fashioned Italian market store to Uncle Giuseppe’s, Carl DelPrete said.

Now more than 20 years later, with more than 2,700 employees at stores in New York and New Jersey, Uncle Giuseppe’s is one of the largest specialty grocers on Long Island, as it continues a growth push that started a few years ago.

But the future expansion, including the opening of the grocer’s 12th store — and eighth on Long Island — in Bohemia this week, followed by two more Long Island openings next year, in Greenvale and Levittown, will be bittersweet for the company, which recently lost a co-founder.

Philip DelPrete, a Melville resident, died at age 64 on Oct. 16.

“And we’ve been together for 40 years in business. He was an instrumental part of what Uncle Giuseppe’s has become today. We’ve been very fortunate that we built a great team,” Carl DelPrete said of his brother, with whom he also had been partners in a separate wholesale produce distribution business since 1986.

Headquartered in Melville, Uncle Giuseppe’s is a high-end, Italian specialty chain that has been able to push growth on and off Long Island and set itself apart from other grocers, in part because it creates a “theater-like” atmosphere in its stores, retail experts said.

“It’s their point of separation with other retailers. Their fresh offerings, their take-home offerings, like their meals … I honestly think it’s their attention to their details on the prepared foods,” said Massapequa native Kevin Gallagher, who is vice president and co-publisher of Food Trade News, a publication in Columbia, Maryland.

The vast majority of the perishable food, from the pizza, to the soups, to the meatballs, to the bread, sold in Uncle Giuseppe’s stores is made from scratch in house, DelPrete said.

Customers can view products being made in pasta and mozzarella rooms and the bakery, while music by Frank Sinatra and other singers of Italian descent plays over the stores' speaker systems.

“We cook every day here. Every meatball that’s prepared is prepared every day and cooked fresh. Every cake, every cookie, is made fresh. So, that’s required. So, every one of our stores is, in essence, a production facility,” said DelPrete, who declined to disclose Uncle Giuseppe’s sales numbers.

Scoping out new sites

Uncle Giuseppe’s goal is to open two stores a year, and it is searching for suitable locations in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, which would be new markets for the grocer, DelPrete said.

“I’m not going to say that we’re not going to open another Long Island store, but it’s really not on our radar,” he said.

The grocer is also exploring the possibility of opening more stores in New Jersey, where it currently has three supermarkets, he said.

“New Jersey has been very good to Uncle Giuseppe’s. So, we’re looking in south Jersey,” he said.

Uncle Giuseppe’s open stores include a location in Yorktown Heights, Westchester County, which opened in 2019; North Babylon, 2020; Morris Plains, New Jersey, 2021; and Tinton Falls, New Jersey, 2023.

Next to open will be the 39,000-square-foot Bohemia store, at 5181 Sunrise Hwy. in a former Babies R Us space in Sayville Plaza. The grocery store will hold a soft opening late Wednesday afternoon and a grand opening Friday.

On Tuesday morning, several shoppers in the parking lot of Sayville Plaza said they were looking forward to the diversity and quality of products that Uncle Giuseppe’s Bohemia store will offer.

“The meat alone is so much more high quality than the regular grocery store. Their bakery is out of this world,” said Bay Shore resident Missy Vella, 49, who has shopped at Uncle Giuseppe’s in North Babylon and Huntington, near her job, she said.

East Patchogue resident Anne DeMaio said she was glad to see more supermarket choices coming to the area, citing the impending opening of another specialty grocer, Whole Foods Market, which is scheduled to open this year in Holbrook, about 2 miles away from the new Uncle Giuseppe’s in Bohemia.

“It will be nice to have different options on the South Shore that everyone’s always had on the North Shore,” said DeMaio, 35. 

In June, Uncle Giuseppe’s plans to open a 52,000-square-foot store in Greenvale, at 130 Wheatley Plaza, which was vacated by a Stop & Shop supermarket in October 2024.

That store and three others on Long Island were among 32 “underperforming” grocery stores in five states that Stop & Shop Supermarket Company LLC closed last year.

Uncle Giuseppe’s also plans to open a 50,000-square-foot supermarket in Levittown in the third quarter of 2026 at 3284 Hempstead Tpke. A King Kullen supermarket vacated that space in October 2024 because the store was “underperforming.”

Uncle Giuseppe’s biggest challenge is finding available space that hits the right demographics for new stores, DelPrete said.

The grocer prefers spaces that are at least 40,000 square feet in suburban areas that are densely populated, average at least 2.5 residents per household and have median household incomes of at least $100,000, he said.

But the grocer will only enter new markets with stores that are at least 55,000 square feet because it is a better way to introduce Uncle Giuseppe’s to new customers, he said.

The grocer is hiring an average of 250 employees per store, which is higher than what is typical for most supermarkets because so much of Uncle Giuseppe’s food is prepared in its stores, DelPrete said.

Maintaining that traditional grocery store environment has meant shunning some common grocery store features, such as self-checkout registers, he said.

“Our board has decided that we’re not going to go in that direction” because Uncle Giuseppe’s wants to offer a more personalized customer service experience, DelPrete said.

The chain has, however, made some changes in response to customers’ requests, such as boosting the amount of natural and organic foods in the last three years, he said.

“Our baby food section is only natural and organic,” he said.

The grocer also recently started a partnership with Goldbelly, an online food marketplace, to ship gift boxes of popular Uncle Giuseppe’s products, such as pasta and cheese, throughout the United States and Canada.