- I recently made my first trip to Wegmans, a family-owned grocery store chain on the East Coast with one of the most loyal followings in
retail . - I was impressed by everything on my trip, from the produce to the prices, but I was really there to try as much of the fresh food as possible.
- I tried a burger, pizza, salad, soup, sushi, fries, and bottled tea, and everything was consistently fresh and high-quality. However, the clear standout of my meal was, surprisingly, my nine-piece box of sushi, which I had pulled from a cold case.
- Sign up for Business Insider's retail newsletter, The Drive-Thru, to get more stories like this in your inbox.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
I recently visited a Wegmans grocery store for the first time in my life, and to say that it changed my life would be an understatement.
Maybe it was the little toy train with Wegmans-themed boxcars that circled several of the dairy and meat fridges. Maybe it was the spacious aisles and glorious stacks of colorful products, immaculately organized and all fresh. Maybe it was the kind and chatty employees who always seemed more than happy to help. Maybe it was a combination of all those things.
However transformative it was to wander the well-stocked aisles of Wegmans, nothing made me fall in love with the store more than its freshly prepared food. The pizza counter has a real pizza oven. Salads are hand-tossed and made-to-order. The sushi counter has a fridge of prepackaged sushi, but also a real sushi bar with sushi chefs.
And none of it breaks the bank.
So I went on a tour de food court and tried to sample as much of the feast as I could humanly carry. Here's how it went: