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They were big proponents of sampling, free coffee samples, cheese samples, offering the first slice of the deli meats behind the counter to the customer to make sure the thickness was right. The Gronskys were some of the early creators of food as theater, food as Disneyland environment, food as a fun place to visit and shop. The customers got to know the employees so it created this family shop vs.

“They wanted people that liked food, liked customers having everything be a service-oriented market forced interaction with our customers. “The Gronsky family built the foundation for the company on service and the quality of people they hired,” Howard says. On weekends, many shoppers would visit the restaurant for breakfast as a prelude to their weekly grocery shop at Manhattan Beach.īecause of the highly interactive service departments, Bristol Farms has operated since the beginning hiring the right people also has been important from the beginning. “The Manhattan Beach store at that time (1991) had one of the only restaurants around for those businesses to visit at lunchtime.” One of his trainees was Craig Tsuchiyama, who has “taken Yoshi’s program to the next level with poke” at Bristol Farms stores today, Howard says.Īlso early on, Bristol Farms operated restaurants inside stores-sit-down full-service restaurants that focused on breakfast and lunch, he said. Kubo started the program and over the years trained many other sushi chefs to prepare different kinds of sushi. He began a personal campaign to get the restaurant’s sushi chef, a Japanese émigré named Yoshi Kubo, to come to Bristol Farms. Gronsky frequented a sushi restaurant and knew he wanted to make it available at Bristol Farms. To this day, Bristol Farms does not sell meat that is overwrapped, he added.īristol Farms also was ahead of its time in offering sushi in its stores. I think (Gronsky and Burbank) were ahead of their time.” “We had a commissary in the back so the food was made fresh and brought right out to the case daily. The meat department was “full-service, everything behind glass, nothing overwrapped like the industry traditionally stocked,” Howard said.

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Eventually, the store added a full complement of grocery departments, plus an adjacent café. So the duo opened Bristol Farms in a space once occupied by a chain store in Rolling Hills, California.Īs one might imagine, meat was the centerpiece of that first store, complemented by produce, according to Steve Howard, VP of perishables, who has been with company 29 of its 35 years. But they weren’t quite ready to stop working altogether, so they decided to try their hand at retail, believing that if they sold fresh, high-quality meat, merchandised like one would find in a butcher shop, they could build a customer base.

Irv Gronsky and Mike Burbank were moving toward retirement age and so decided to sell their high-end meat business that supplied restaurants and butcher shops. Bristol Farms was founded in November 1982 by two men whose careers had been in the meat business.