Uncle Giuseppe’s taking over Greenvale Stop & Shop supermarket location

Uncle Giuseppe’s Marketplace is seizing an opportunity that will be created by the exit of a Stop & Shop supermarket in Greenvale.

A high-end, full-service grocer specializing in Italian food, Uncle Giuseppe’s will open a supermarket in an approximately 52,000-square-foot space at 130 Wheatley Plaza in Greenvale in the first quarter of 2026, said Carl DelPrete, chief executive officer of the Melville-based chain of 11 stores in New York and New Jersey. Stop & Shop will close its store in that location this year.

“Uncle Giuseppe’s is always looking for opportunities in great neighborhoods in certain areas with the right square footage and this opportunity happened to come up. We’re very excited for Greenvale,” DelPrete said Monday.

Stop & Shop’s Greenvale store is among the 32 “underperforming” supermarkets in five states, including four stores on Long Island, that The Stop & Shop Supermarket Company LLC, based in Quincy, Massachusetts, said it will close on or before Nov. 2, Newsday reported last week.

The Stop & Shop in Greenvale is in a former Pathmark supermarket space that it has occupied since 2015. The space was among 25 former Pathmark and Waldbaum’s supermarkets in the New York metro area, including nine on Long Island, that Stop & Shop acquired from the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., or A&P, following the company’s filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2015.

Uncle Giuseppe’s signed a lease for the Greenvale store about two months ago, DelPrete said. Wheatley Plaza’s owner, Castagna Realty Co. Inc. in Manhasset, did not respond to Newsday’s request for comment.

Plans to go South

Uncle Giuseppe’s plans to open one or two new stores annually to reach 20 supermarkets by 2029, DelPrete said.

“And we’re looking from Connecticut on south into Pennsylvania at this present time,” he said.

The first Uncle Giuseppe’s store opened in East Meadow in 1998. The family-owned chain now has 11 stores, including one that opened in Yorktown Heights, Westchester County, in 2019; North Babylon in 2020; Morris Plains, New Jersey, in 2021; and Tinton Falls, New Jersey, in 2023.

Uncle Giuseppe’s had been seeking new store spaces that were about 50,000 square feet, DelPrete said. Those spaces are becoming more difficult to find, in part because landlords tend to want to subdivide such large spaces for multiple tenants, so now Uncle Giuseppe’s considers smaller spaces, at about 40,000 square feet, he said.

All the grocery stores that Uncle Giuseppe’s has opened have been in places where previous supermarkets closed because they were underperforming, DelPrete said.

He said he is not concerned about how Uncle Giuseppe’s will perform in Greenvale, saying that Stop & Shop has struggled there because its store needed to be remodeled.

“Uncle Giuseppe’s is a different model that people seem to like. So, we’re not concerned at all,” he said.

The Uncle Giuseppe’s store in Greenvale will employ about 240 full- and part-time workers, DelPrete said. The store will be similar in size and layout to the Uncle Giuseppe’s store in Melville, which opened in 2017, he said.