The Best Grocery Store Chain in Every State

With more than 800 locations in Florida and other units scattered around six other Southern states, Publix is the largest employee-owned grocery chain in America.

Owned by the Kroger Company, with locations throughout the Northwest, Fred Meyer is considered not just a supermarket but a hypermarket — meaning that in addition to food and drink items, the stores sell clothing, home and health and beauty products, electronics, and more.

The first Sprouts, whose motto is “Healthy Living for Less,” was opened by members of the Boney family in Chandler, Arizona, in 2002. It subsequently merged with another Boney enterprise, the California-based Henry’s Farmers Markets, and later acquired the 37-unit Sunflower Farmers Market chain.

Sam’s Club is Walmart’s equivalent to Costco — a membership-only discount chain that has become a major purveyor of groceries along with almost every other kind of merchandise you can imagine. Founded in 1983, it was named after Walmart founder Sam Walton.

Trader Joe’s is a California native: The first store was opened in 1967 in Pasadena, just northeast of Los Angeles, by former drugstore executive Joe Coulombe — the original “Trader Joe.” It has since grown into a chain with outlets in 41 states, known for its extensive range of house-branded products and its discount wine and beer.

This Colorado-born chain was actually founded by a King — grocer Lloyd J. King, who had earlier launched a small group of markets called Save-a-Nickel. There are now King Soopers stores all along the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, mostly in Colorado but also in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Since 2007, the chain has been part of the Kroger Company.

The Stop & Shop chain dates its origins back to 1914, when the Rabinowitz family opened a small grocery in Somerville, Massachusetts. Four years later, it had grown to a 32-store chain, and today includes almost 420 locations in the New York Tri-State area, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. It is credited with pioneering the superstore concept in Massachusetts in 1982. Since 1996, it has been owned by the European supermarket conglomerate now called Ahold Delhaize.

A membership chain selling many other items in addition to groceries, BJ’s is a smaller competitor to Costco and Sam’s Club, with just over 210 stores in 16 states. In 2014, BJ’s became the first major wholesale retail chain to begin donating unsold poultry, meat, fish, and produce to local food banks and other hunger-relief agencies.

Employing more than 200,000 people, the Publix chain recorded retail sales in 2018 of $36.1 billion. It has 1,239 locations in all, as well as nine distribution centers (all but two in Florida) and 11 manufacturing facilities (in Florida and Georgia).

Publix has been recognized by Fortune as one of the country’s most admired companies every year since 1994, and has also won plaudits from that publication for being, among other things, one of the “100 Best Companies to Work For,” “Best Workplaces in Retail,” “Best Workplaces for Women,” “Best Workplaces for Diversity,” and “Best Workplaces for Millennials.”

This massive warehouse-style retailer descends from a business-to-business store called Price Club, opened in San Diego, California, in 1976. The first Costco opened independently in Seattle in 1983, and ten years later the two enterprises merged. Today, there are more than 760 locations in eight countries, accounting for total annual sales of more than $64 billion.

It’s fitting that Albertsons is Idaho’s favorite supermarket, since the chain was founded in the state’s capital in 1939. According to the company website, in those days, “For just over 75 cents, customers [could] purchase three pounds of tomatoes, a pound of coffee and a one-pound roast.”

Now one of the Albertsons Companies brands, Jewel grew out of a door-to-door tea and coffee wagon founded in 1899. This grew into Jewel Food Stores, and the company began acquiring other chains — including Osco Drugs in 1960. Known today as Jewel-Osco, the chain operates 188 stores in the greater Chicago area, as well as in Indiana and Iowa.

Using his life savings — $372 — a merchant’s son named Barney Kroger opened a grocery store in downtown Cincinnati in 1883. According to the Kroger Company, which now runs thousands of supermarkets under numerous banners, as the business grew, Kroger’s became the first market to bake its own bread and the first to sell meat and groceries under the same roof.

The small general store opened in Beaconsfield, Iowa, in 1930 by Charles Hyde and David Vredenburg (the “Hy” and “Vee” of the market’s name) has grown into a chain of more than 240 supermarkets and drugstores in Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.

Hy-Vee is an unusual chain in that it allows its store directors (managers) to select inventory and set prices. Directors and executive staff also meet regularly to hear presentations and vote on corporate policies — and since 1933, the chain has paid its managers on a profit-sharing basis.

Kroger’s was not only the first chain to bake its own bread; founder Barney Kroger also made his own branded sauerkraut from excess cabbage he bought from local farmers. This was the beginning of what has become one of America’s largest food manufacturing businesses. Kroger now operates 40 facilities making everything from soda pop to peanut butter.

Rouses Markets — which started as a single store in Houma, Louisiana, just southwest of New Orleans, in 1960 — now numbers 63 units, mostly in its home state but with three outposts on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and eight in Lower Alabama. In 2011, downtown New Orleans got its first major grocery when Rouses opened in the city’s Warehouse District.

Hannaford got its start as a produce cart on the Portland, Maine, waterfront in 1883. By 1920, it had grown into a major produce wholesaler, venturing into the retail grocery business for the first time in 1944. Through an expansion program and the acquisition of numerous smaller chains since then, Hannaford has grown to 167 stores. In 2009 its new supermarket in Augusta, Maine, was the first grocery store in America to be certified LEED Platinum for its environmental practices. Hannaford is now part of Ahold Delhaize.

Part of the international Ahold Delhaize company, Giant was founded in 1936 as the first supermarket in Washington, D.C. Today, the brand operates more than 150 stores in the capital and throughout Virginia and Maryland. It makes a point of its work with women’s, veterans’, and LGBTQ+ groups as part of its commitment to diversity and inclusion.

“Market Basket” has proved a popular name for supermarkets. There was a well-known chain of that name in Southern California in the mid-20th century, and there are currently 31 Market Basket supermarkets in southeastern Texas and Louisiana. Neither has anything to do with this Market Basket, though. This one grew out of a small food store opened in 1917 in Lowell, Massachusetts, by Greek immigrants Athanasios and Efrosini Demoulas. This grew into the DeMoulas Super Market chain, which branded one of its stores, in New Hampshire, as Market Basket in 1975. Today there are 80 Market Basket stores in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.

Not to be confused with the Kroger Company’s Fred Meyer market chain, Meijer has its origins in Greenville, Michigan, in 1934, when barber Hendrik Meijer and his 14-year-old son, Fred, started selling provisions to barbershop customers. There are more than 200 stores today, in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana.

With stores in eight Midwestern states and annual sales of $10 billion, Iowa-based Hy-Vee is ranked among the top 25 supermarket chains in America and also one of the country’s top 50 private companies. The chain is employee-owned.

According to its corporate parent, the Kroger Company, Kroger’s became the first grocery chain to regularly monitor product quality, back in the 1930s, and in 1972 became the first retail grocery store to test an electronic scanner — installed at one of its units in suburban Cincinnati. The company’s merchandise and supplies reach Mississippi and other states through what is said to be one of the nation’s largest privately owned trucking fleets.

From its beginnings in North St. Louis in 1939, the family-owned Schnucks has grown into a chain of almost 100 units in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Family patriarch Edwin Schnuck ran a wholesale meat business, and the growing market chain branded itself as the home of “Meat Masters.” It is still known for the quality of its meats today.

Albertsons, founded in 1939 by a former district manager for Safeway, is now the flagship of the Albertsons Companies. Its other banners — under which it operates some 2,269 stores in 34 states and the District of Columbia — include Vons, Shaw’s, Acme, Pavilions, and, yes, Safeway.

Like many other supermarket chains, Hy-Vee makes an effort to promote sustainability. This means everything from green store design and construction and energy and resource conservation to the sale of many natural, organic, and locally sourced products and adherence to a Responsible Choice Seafood program based on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch initiative.

Smith’s grew out of a dry goods grocery store opened in 1911 in Brigham City, just north of Ogden, by one Lorenzo Smith. This in turn grew into Smith and Son’s Market and then, in 1952, was refurbished and expanded to Smith’s Super Market. Today, Smith’s — which operates 132 stores not just in its Utah birthplace and Nevada, but also in New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.

Hannaford made the decision to expand into New Hampshire from its native Maine in 1946. It consolidated its holdings in the state with the 1990 purchase of the local Alexander’s chain and the 2004 acquisition of Victory Supermarkets of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The company chose Dover, New Hampshire, as the site of its first Hannaford To Go outlet, allowing customers to order groceries online and pick them up at the store, a program that continues to expand to other locations.

The ShopRite origin story has it that the chain was born in 1946, after a group of independent Garden State grocers told a representative of Del Monte Foods that they were having difficulty getting reasonable wholesale prices for their merchandise. He suggested that they form a buyers’ cooperative, which they did, launching as Wakefern Foods. In 1951, the coop started using the name ShopRite. Today it is the largest corporate employer in New Jersey.

The Arizona-based Sprouts chain, whose stated mission is to provide “natural” foods at affordable prices, now numbers more than 340 stores nationwide. The chain says that more than 90% of the 19,000-plus products they carry are natural or organic.

Since 1979, Trader Joe’s has been owned by a trust belonging to Germany’s Albrecht family, who also own the massive international Aldi supermarket chain, with more than 10,000 stores across Europe and the U.S. Trader Joe’s, meanwhile, is considerably smaller, with about 500 locations.

Under the umbrella of Belgium-based Ahold Delaize, Food Lion operates more than a thousand supermarkets in ten Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic states. The chain was founded as Food Town in Salisbury, North Carolina, which remains its home base, in 1957. It was renamed Food Lion in 1983.

From its modest beginnings 136 years ago in Cincinnati (still its home base), Kroger has grown into the largest grocery chain in the world, not counting the big-box multi-product retailers Walmart and Costco — and is also the world’s third-largest retail company of any kind, after those two big-box firms, based on revenue.

In its 36 years of existence, Sam’s Club has grown to encompass almost 600 locations in the U.S. (including Puerto Rico), and there are also stores in Mexico, Brazil, and China. Though not specifying exact numbers, the company says that it “serves millions of members.”

Fred Meyer, born Grubmeyer, was a German immigrant whose father ran a grocery store in Brooklyn in the late 19th century. Meyer moved to Oregon as a young man, and after some years of selling coffee to Oregon farm workers from a horse-drawn cart, he opened his first grocery store, in Portland, in 1922. Today there are more than 130 Fred Meyer markets in four states.

This retailers’ coop operates 30 stores in Pennsylvania, 14 of them in Philadelphia. Acme was once the dominant chain in the City of Brotherly Love, but ShopRite superseded it in 2011. ShopRite currently has almost 300 stores, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Delaware, and Maryland.

The quintessential millennials’ supermarket, Whole Foods — now famously owned by Amazon — is the world’s 58th-largest retailer and America’s fifth-largest supermarket company (not counting Walmart or Costco). Founded by four local business leaders in Austin, Texas, in 1980, it went on to acquire countless other natural foods chains, and now has almost 500 stores around the U.S.

This Southern chain is actively involved in community issues, being ranked in 2017 at No. 1 in nationwide giving by March of Dimes and No. 2 among Top Companies for Social Responsibility by the Harris Poll.

Walmart dominates the Midwestern market area encompassing Nebraska, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, and South Dakota — as it dominates the U.S. grocery business in general — but Hy-Vee is a strong competitor, following Walmart’s 32% market share in the region, with a 20.6% share of its own. The chain has 11 stores in South Dakota, seven of them in Sioux Falls.

While the trend in supermarkets seems to be towards smaller stores, Kroger’s newer units span typically 65,000 square feet or more. They stock as many as 50,000 items each. In addition, the almost 2,500 markets operating under various Kroger banners sell enough flowers to make the company the world’s largest florist.

The sixth-largest grocery chain in America (not counting Walmart and Costco), with annual sales of almost $20 billion, H-E-B descends from a food store opened in Kerrville, Texas, in 1905 by Florence Butt. Her son, Howard E. Butt, took over and expanded the enterprise in the 1920s, and his initials gave it its modern name. Still family-owned, it operates more than 350 stores in Texas and northeastern Mexico.

In the 1980s, under the third generation of Smith family ownership, the supermarket chain phased out its smaller conventional markets and superstores, replacing them with combination food and drug outlets — some as big as 84,000 square feet. In 1997, the chain merged with Oregon-based Fred Meyer, and in 1999 the combined enterprise was merged into the giant Kroger Company.

One of the oldest continuously operating supermarket chains in the country, Shaw’s was born out of a small grocery store opened in Portland, Maine, by George Clinton Shaw in 1860. Another Maine resident, Maynard A. Davis, founded a chain called BPM in Massachusetts in 1919, and subsequently bought Shaw’s operation. The two companies were operated independently, growing and eventually, in 1979, merging. Shaw’s became part of the Albertson Companies in 2013, and there are 154 stores under the Shaw’s name today throughout New England.

Harris Teeter grew out of two independently owned North Carolina grocery stores, W. T. Harris in Charlotte and Teeters Food Mart in Mooresville. The two merged in 1960 to form Harris Teeter Supermarkets Inc. Now a wholly owned subsidiary of the massive Kroger Company, Harris Teeter operates more than 230 stores and 14 fuel centers in seven states and Washington, D.C.

The Fred Meyer hypermarkets, part of the Kroger Company, are huge, occupying an average of 150,000 square feet and carrying more than 225,000 products each — not just food and drink but also many other kinds of merchandise.

The Kroger stores participate in their parent company’s Zero Hunger / Zero Waste program. Noting that while hunger is an issue for one in eight Americans, some 40% of the food produced in the U.S. gets thrown away. Through soliciting contributions, donating to food banks, and offering zero-waste recipes, among other initiatives, Kroger is committed “to ending hunger in our communities and eliminating waste across our company by 2025.”

A produce stand — opened by John Daniel Woodman in Janesville, southeast of Madison, in 1919 — was the genesis of this popular Wisconsin chain. Unlike many supermarkets that started small, though, Woodman’s has stayed small. It now consists of only 17 stores, all in Wisconsin or Illinois, accounting for over $1 billion in annual sales. Though the number of units is small, the units themselves are not. Typical store size is about 240,000 square feet.

This is the namesake chain of the Albertsons Companies, which operates numerous chains in 34 states and the nation’s capital, as well as the meal kit company Plated and almost 1,750 pharmacies. The Albertsons Companies Foundation is a major contributor to hunger relief, education, cancer research, and other social programs.