Fairway Market is an American grocery chain founded in 1933 by Nathan Glickberg. It is one of the brands owned by the Wakefern Food Corporation, whose flagship supermarket cooperative network is ShopRite. The prime location at Broadway and West 74th Street, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is one of four surviving stores as of 2020 that are operated by Wakefern cooperative member, Village Super Markets.

Sale to private equity

Fairway Market is a specialty market with four locations in Manhattan. Sterling Investment Partners, a private equity firm in Westport, Connecticut, bought a controlling stake in Fairway Market in January 2007 and expanded the chain in the Greater New York area. Sterling made a $150 million capital investment in Fairway leading to enterprise growth. In 2011, the chain had revenues of $550 million. It was spun off in an IPO on April 17, 2013, trading under its parent, Fairway Group Holdings Corp., on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol "FWM".

History

The original Fairway Market at West 74th Street on Manhattan's Upper West Side was originally a produce shop. By 1997, it had expanded with a café that became a steakhouse at night. In 2011, Fairway opened two more locations: one on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which opened on July 20, and the other in the Douglaston neighborhood of Queens, which opened on November 16. In 2012, Fairway Market opened three more locations: in Woodland Park, New Jersey, on June 6; Westbury, New York, on August 22; and Kips Bay in Manhattan in late December. In 2013, Fairway Market opened a location in Chelsea, Manhattan, and another at The Shops at Nanuet shopping mall in Nanuet, New York. As of 2020, all but five of these Fairway stores have either closed or sold to other retailers, including Amazon. The sequence of all stores is as follows: In 2023, Fairway partnered with Instacart; launching a delivery service called Fairway Now that services three stores in the Manhattan area. In 2024, Village Supermarkets which acquired Fairway Market in 2020, opened a new store in Old Bridge, N.J. that features departments borrowed from Fairway Market's banners in New York City.