The Apple of Groceries: What Erewhon Reveals About Retail Success

The first thing I noticed when I walked into Erewhon was not the products. It was the feeling of the place.

Erewhon is a grocery chain in Los Angeles, and I visited one of its stores during a trip in September.

Warm materials, soft light, a calm that has nothing to do with a supermarket. Then the order: fruit and vegetables arranged in colour blocks, shelves where each product stands exactly in line with its neighbour, repeated until the shelf becomes a pattern. 

It felt less like a supermarket and more like an Apple Store that happens to sell kale chips.

Then I looked at the prices. Smoothies at around USD 20, and everyday products at prices that would make even a Zurich shopper hesitate.

And yet the store was full.

In an economy where almost anything can be ordered online and delivered within 24 hours, that is not a detail. When people make the effort to come into a store, they expect something a website cannot give them.

At first, I was surprised. Then came the recognition that I had seen this playbook before.

One playbook, three industries

Apple opened its first stores in 2001 and turned what used to be a computer shop into a place people visit for its own sake. By 2017, according to eMarketer data reported by AppleInsider, Apple was the most productive retailer in the United States, with about USD 5,546 in sales per square foot.

About fifteen years ago, I lived a version of this story myself. At Swisscom, I was part of the team behind a new store concept called Campus, conceptualised and rolled out over several years from around 2010 to 2013 to more than 100 stores, and I was in charge of accessories. The old stores worked like post offices: you took a ticket, waited for your number, and left. Nobody browsed.

We started with the customer journey in mind. The existing stores did not really have one, so there was nothing to build on: we had to create new pilot stores and test variations, observing how people moved through them, where they stopped and how they behaved. The result was a store designed around that journey.

But that was not all. We also improved the feel of the store with wooden floors, warmer materials and better lighting, so that people felt at ease rather than in a queue. Accessories were staged in colour blocks and repeated patterns.

Over the following years, accessory sales grew from roughly CHF 30 million to around CHF 80 million a year. To be completely transparent, we broadened the range at the same time (smartphone accessories, gadgets, audio, app-controlled devices), so the environment did not do this alone. But dwell time, sales and customer experience, measured across the new stores, all pointed the same way: for the first time, customers looked around and browsed products.

Erewhon is the latest, and probably the most extreme, version of this move. Bought in 2011 by Tony and Josephine Antoci and turned into the upscale format it is today, the chain now has 14 stores in Southern California, with three more planned for 2027 (Grocery Dive, 2026).

In 2019, Forbes reported that Erewhon made around USD 2,500 per square foot, more than four times as much as most grocery stores. For a Swiss benchmark, Coop, generally seen as the more upmarket of Switzerland's two big grocers, generated around CHF 1,100 per square foot in its supermarkets in 2024 (my calculation from Coop's 2024 annual report: CHF 12.1 billion in supermarket sales, including online sales, over about 1.03 million m² of sales area). Erewhon does not publish its revenue, and the three figures come from different years, currencies and sources, so read them as an illustration rather than a ranking. Still, they place a grocery store in Apple territory.

Erewhon also adds a layer Apple never needed: celebrity drinks. Hailey Bieber's smoothie sold more than 40,000 units a month at its peak, and around 60,000 members pay up to USD 200 a year for perks (Marketing Brew, 2025). As far as I could find, there is no academic research on this specific model. There is plenty on celebrity endorsement and on influencers, but nothing on retailer-led celebrity products in grocery. So this part is my reading, not research: the drinks work less as a product line than as a media channel, one more way for the store to stand apart from every other grocery store.

Three companies, three sectors, more than twenty years: technology, telecommunications and groceries. The same move each time.

Groceries matter most in this list. They are the most everyday, most price-driven kind of shopping there is. If upscaling the environment works there, the lesson is not reserved for luxury brands.

This begs the question: why does it keep working?

What the research says: a pleasant store makes people stay, and spend

The best answer comes from environmental psychology. In 1982, Donovan and Rossiter brought a simple model into retail research: the environment triggers an emotional state, mainly pleasure and arousal, and that state leads either to approach (staying, exploring, buying) or to avoidance (leaving as soon as possible).

Twelve years later, Donovan, Rossiter, Marcoolyn and Nesdale (1994) tested the model with real shoppers, measuring their emotions during the shopping trip rather than afterwards. The result is one of the most cited findings in retail research: how pleasant shoppers found the store, five minutes into their visit, predicted how much extra time they spent there and how much they spent beyond what they had planned.

The key insight here is that this effect came on top of the usual reasons for choosing a store, such as variety, product quality, price promotions and value for money. The environment does not replace a good offer. It adds to it.

This matters for marketers because it changes what a store is for. It does not only host the purchase, it can shape its size. A ticket queue is a textbook avoidance environment, and that was precisely the problem at Swisscom: customers came for a subscription and left as quickly as they could. 

A study of two furniture stores points in the same direction: in the more pleasant store, customers spontaneously spent more on items they simply liked (Spies, Hesse and Loesch, 1997). That is exactly what accessories are: things you did not come in for.

The store sets the price before the label does

The second mechanism explains the Erewhon side of the story. Baker, Parasuraman, Grewal and Voss (2002), publishing in the Journal of Marketing, found that among all store cues (the people, the ambience, the design), design cues have the most pervasive influence on how shoppers judge a store. In their study, store design was the only cue that shaped how shoppers judged the quality of the merchandise, and a more appealing design also led them to expect somewhat higher prices.

That was my sequence at Erewhon. The feeling of the place came first, then the order, and only then the prices, which were high but somehow consistent with everything around them.

The consequence is simple: a nicer environment does two jobs at once. It makes people stay longer and spend more than planned, and it makes premium prices feel coherent rather than shocking.

Two caveats before you redesign your store

Before you call your shopfitter, keep two things in mind.

First, the effects are real, but they are not magic. A meta-analysis of 66 studies on music, scent and colour in stores found effects on pleasure, satisfaction and intentions that were small to medium in size (Roschk, Loureiro and Breitsohl, 2017). Interestingly, music and scent tended to have stronger effects in service settings than in retail. My reading is that bank branches or clinics, the places that still feel like waiting rooms, may have the most to gain.

Second, we only hear the success stories (survivorship bias). Apple, Swisscom and Erewhon are visible because the move worked for them; store makeovers that failed rarely make the news. This is why the research matters more than the cases. It shows that the mechanism holds beyond three well-known brands, and it also shows its limit. The environment amplifies a good offer. It does not rescue a weak one.

Feel, Frame, Flow

What follows is my attempt to turn the research and my own experience into something a small team can use. It is an organising principle rather than a proven method, and it follows the order in which a customer experiences a store.

1. Feel. The first seconds at the entrance: materials, light, warmth, sound. This is where the pleasure comes from that Donovan and colleagues linked to extra time and unplanned spending.
2. Frame. What shoppers see once they get closer: how the products are staged, in colour blocks, repeated, aligned, nothing out of place. This is where the store sets quality expectations before anyone reads a price tag.
3. Flow. What connects the two and turns them into a retail asset: the paths, the stopping points, where each category sits. Great materials and great staging without a good structure do not have the same impact. If there is a secret ingredient, it is probably the flow.

Customers experience a store in this order. When you design or change one, keep the customer journey in mind from the start, because in the end, that is what you want to influence: how people move, where they stop, and what they do.

At Swisscom, our pilot stores taught us something before I ever read the research. The materials and the staging made customers feel welcome and stay longer. But the glue that ties it all together, and makes customers buy more, is a store organised around how people actually move. Beautiful surfaces without that structure do not have the same effect.

What this means for a small business

So what can you do without Apple's architects or Erewhon's budget?

Start with the frame. Staging is the cheapest lever, and it does not need more floor space. Group similar products, build colour blocks, repeat the same item instead of scattering it, and align everything. This works in a 30 m² shop as well as in a flagship store. In my experience, it is also the change customers notice first.

Turn waiting time into browsing time. Every store has moments where customers wait: at the counter, in a queue, near the fitting rooms, while an order is being prepared. You cannot always remove them, but you can design them. Place products that are easy to pick up (accessories, add-ons, small items) where people wait, and stage them like the rest of the store. At Swisscom, this was exactly the goal: turning people who waited for their turn into shoppers who browsed.

Raise the environment only as far as your offer can follow. An upscale setting raises expectations about quality and price. If the products do not match, the gap becomes visible, and the setting works against you.

Apple has been doing this for more than twenty years, Swisscom for about fifteen, and Erewhon since 2011, and all three are still doing it. This is not a trend that came and went. It is a lesson that keeps repeating, and in a digital-first economy, where a visit to a store has to earn its place, it matters more than ever.

You do not need to become the Apple of your industry. But your store, your showroom or your waiting room says something about your products or services before you do. Make sure it says what you want it to say.

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Sources

AppleInsider (2017) 'Apple leads brick-and-mortar retail with $ 5,546 in sales per square foot', AppleInsider, 28 July. Available at: https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/07/28/apple-leads-brick-and-mortar-retail-with-5546-in-sales-per-square-foot (Accessed: 12 October 2026).

Baker, J., Parasuraman, A., Grewal, D. and Voss, G.B. (2002) 'The influence of multiple store environment cues on perceived merchandise value and patronage intentions', Journal of Marketing, 66(2), pp. 120–141. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.66.2.120.18470 (Accessed: 12 October 2026).

Coop (2025) Coop-Gruppe in Zahlen, Geschäftsbericht 2024. Basel: Coop. Available at: https://report.coop.ch/pdfs/Coop_GB_24_Coop_Gruppe_in_Zahlen_de_38bc16d451.pdf (Accessed: 12 October 2026).

Donovan, R.J. and Rossiter, J.R. (1982) 'Store atmosphere: an environmental psychology approach', Journal of Retailing, 58(1), pp. 34–57.

Donovan, R.J., Rossiter, J.R., Marcoolyn, G. and Nesdale, A. (1994) 'Store atmosphere and purchasing behavior', Journal of Retailing, 70(3), pp. 283–294. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-4359(94)90037-X (Accessed: 12 October 2026).

Grocery Dive (2026) 'Erewhon opens first location outside Los Angeles County', Grocery Dive, 1 September. Available at: https://www.grocerydive.com/news/erewhon-thousand-oaks-location-open/829266/ (Accessed: 12 October 2026).

Hicks, K. (2025) 'Blended and branded: the business behind Erewhon smoothie collabs', Marketing Brew, 1 December. Available at: https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/2025/12/01/business-behind-erewhon-smoothie-collabs (Accessed: 12 October 2026).

Roschk, H., Loureiro, S.M.C. and Breitsohl, J. (2017) 'Calibrating 30 years of experimental research: a meta-analysis of the atmospheric effects of music, scent, and color', Journal of Retailing, 93(2), pp. 228–240. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2016.10.001 (Accessed: 12 October 2026).

Sorvino, C. (2019) 'Organic grocer Erewhon eyes expansion after private equity deal', Forbes, 7 October. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2019/10/07/erewhon-stripes-group-investment/ (Accessed: 12 October 2026).

Spies, K., Hesse, F. and Loesch, K. (1997) 'Store atmosphere, mood and purchasing behavior', International Journal of Research in Marketing, 14(1), pp. 1–17. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-8116(96)00015-8 (Accessed: 12 October 2026).