Stew Leonard on Grocery Store Space (Audio)

us more is Stu Leonard. He is the chief executive of Stu Leonards Fresh Food Store and you can of course follow him on Twitter at Stu Leonard. Stu Leonard, thanks for being here. I love it. It's great being with you guys. Tell us about stulet give people the sort of thirty second second. Grandfather started delivering milk in twenties. My father started retail and built a dairy plant where you could watch the milk being bottle. We got it all from local farms, and then we added fish meat produce.

Now we have a big farmer's mark, get it. We have five stores around the New York area. UM people work for us, UM and UM and we just have fun. We sell all fresh, local good food in the store. Tell us how that fun part evolved. You know, as Pim has noted. New York Times called you the disney Landed dairy stores. Are colleague Courtney Donahoe, who loves your store hus for years. It looks like a Kia. It's

just so cool. Describe for our listeners who have never been to Stud Leonards what that element is, where it came from, what we did. We just had this thing. We want to make it fun for families to come and shop, and it's sort of InVogue today. But my dad, when we were growing up, we used to go to Disney in Las Vegas all the time, so it's all theatrics and shows. So we tried to bring a little bit back to Stud Leonards. So the New York Times called is a disney Landed dairy stores once. So we

try to make it fun. There's animation, and you smile and dance when you walk around the store. How can you're not smile and dance when you've got a cow, uh not a real well, sometimes a cow walking around the aisles. It walks around and you can push a button here move tell us about the business because I know what you're doing maybe about half a billion here in sales, and you carry many fewer items than the

competing grocery store chains. Why is that. Well, one of the things we we we just sell the best sellers and we're mainly fresh. So if you take the middle out of a grocery store and just look at the perimeter walls of the meat, fish produced cheese deli, that's our main items at stew Letters. So we have two thousand items compared to your normal supermarket that might have fifty. That's quite a quite a big difference. I want to ask you now about something that is maybe more serious side.

But I'm sure when we talked about smiles on people's faces, it has to do with putting smiles on your workers faces. And that how has to do with your your health program. You've gotten a head start, you've got in store health screenings, you've got all kinds of things, and you've been able to show excellent results results. Tell us about that. Well, one of the things we did was we we um we went and we were one of the top one companies you know, Fortune magazine rated in in America to

work at. So we did that for ten years in a row. Then we decided we want to be one of the best healthcare companies. So we put a big initiative on healthcare. And so what we did everybody free physicals. We give everybody thousand dollars to go get a physical because what we want to do is have you get a dashboard to find out what your blood pressure is, your sugar level for diabetes, do you need lipatore, any drugs. So what we've done is be able to get our people.

We had twenty two percent of our population that went to the doctors. Now it's almost ninety so almost everybody he's getting a physical now every year. And then we add some of the programs you mentioned, which is, you know, ways to reduce stress, ways to control your weight, stop smoking, um and and all sorts of programs to try to help you get healthier. Well, I noticed that you're wearing a fitbit. Yeah, we've got a fit Bit challenge in

the stores, that's right. Yeah, we we gave out three hundred of these to everybody at at St. Leonards, and you know, we have it where they can come into program and get into contest. And today I gotta get my ten thousand steps in and I'm way behind because I'm sitting here. You can run up and down some of those stairs here at Blue they've got many floors topid. What kind of healthcare plan do you offer to your employees.

I think there's you know, as the as big companies are dropping out of the the Obamacare exchanges is people have their kids growing up and maybe they got to buy insurance. People are beating to see it's it's not such a great deal necessarily for everybody was cracked up to be. One of the things we've been able to do over the last you know, five six years, is we have not had an increase in our healthcare costs.

We've been able to control it. And one of the things we're doing is we're creating these value centers at the store. So if you need as an example, says,

I had to get my rotator cuff shoulder surgery. I went around was twelve thousand dollars to get it at the local hospital, and I found I could go to one of these you know, physician clinics and it was only gonna be Now we're able to offer if one of our team members it stews gets will give them like to bonus for doing that, So we're incentivizing everybody to shop healthcare. Next time you go to the doctor, ask them how much that procedure costs, and of the

time they have no idea. It's like we're buying food. You know how much a Porterhouse steak costs or lobster right now, but you won't know how much healthcare costs. So we're educating our population of people at Stews on costs to get these procedures done, and it's helped us lower our costs. Last point to you, because we gotta run. You're still doing the free ice cream. As a matter of fact, I gave you my business card. Look on the back of it. You'll see you can come into Stews. Okay,

you get a free ice cream cone. Pim, you spend a hundred dollars to get a free cone. Favor you'll get not only any flavor, will bring you back and let you make your own con St. Leonard and he's going to wear the cow outfit too. He's the CEO of Stu Leonards, a fresh food store. We thank him so much for joining us in studio today. I'm Kathleen Hayes along with Pim Fox taking stock this is Boomberg,