$40 For a Smoothie? Why People Are Obsessed With This Celebrity Grocery Store
Premiums are just something we’ve come to accept these days. It used to be concert tickets; now they’re more than rent once was. Coffee stealthily inched its way over the $7 mark without anyone filing a class-action lawsuit. Upscale pricing has somehow insinuated itself into nearly every aspect of modern living. Groceries, though. Groceries still feel personal. You’re not supposed to be judged on what and how you eat; that’s the one place where practicality rears its head. And yet, in a time when grocery prices feel high enough to begin with, we now have a grocery store where a single smoothie is the price of a nice dinner.
A Sign of the Times
Erewhon’s backstory is far more wholesome than its current status would have you believe. The company was established in Boston in 1966 by Michio and Aveline Kushi, the founders of the macrobiotic diet. Named for Samuel Butler’s 1872 satirical novel Erewhon (an anagram for “nowhere”), which envisioned a utopian society where individuals were held personally accountable for their health and reprimanded for being ill, Erewhon started out simply as a health food manufacturer with one store in Boston.
The Kushis moved to Los Angeles in 1969 and opened the Erewhon Natural Food Store (currently Erewhon’s oldest running store) in the Fairfax District the same year. A decade later, the company was acquired from bankruptcy by an employee named Tom DeSilva, who kept the Erewhon brand afloat through a dedicated but limited customer base. In 2011, Tony and Josephine Antoci took over the Fairfax store and reimagined Erewhon as an entirely different beast: a high-end, luxury supermarket.
The plan was a success. The private equity firm Stripes Group acquired a minority stake in 2019, and in 2021 Erewhon became a certified B Corporation. Today, the brand can be found throughout Los Angeles County, ships nationwide and even internationally, and has since long surpassed its roots as a health store.
The Cost of Luxury
These days, Erewhon has 10 stores spread out across Los Angeles County, though each feels less like a grocer than a fancy boutique. Everything in the stores is meticulously curated. Lighting is spotless. Packaging is minimal and considered. Shelves are filled with imported Japanese strawberries for $19 each and custom celebrity smoothies that start at $17 and then soar well above that once add-ons are thrown into the mix.
Erewhon has taken that concept and run with it. It’s not difficult to spend $300+ on groceries in one trip to Erewhon. And yet, the stores keep making more and more money. In 2023, Erewhon raked in $171.4 million in profit, an absolutely bonkers number for so few stores.
It all comes back to exclusivity. Erewhon is less about the food it sells than the access it provides, to a community, a scene, an aesthetic. Purchasing from Erewhon is, in and of itself, a statement about who you are, or at least who you wish you were. It’s not dissimilar to the luxury fashion industry, where the high cost isn’t a turn-off; it’s the whole point.
Erewhon is expensive, but it is also ideological. The shelves line up the tenets of an uncompromising, almost puritanical vision of health. Dairy is raw. Meat is grass-fed. Supplements have entire aisles dedicated to them. Every label implicitly promises the same thing: that you are doing the right thing. You are optimizing. You are healing.
