Whole Foods Market
It's time to visit the latest Whole Foods Daily Shop, which opened in the trendy Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg this week. This store is just under 8,000 square feet, putting it in line with the other New York City locations. This and a smaller store in Hoboken, NJ are the only small-format Daily Shops outside of Manhattan in this area (there's another in Virginia), but Whole Foods has said they intend to continue to expand the chain.
The store is designed very similarly to the other NYC locations (Hoboken, by nature of its history, has a rather different interior design). Produce is the first department you enter to, with baked goods on the front wall. Prepared foods, cheese, and meat/seafood are in the first aisle, with dairy on the back wall and frozen in the last aisle. There's a small health and beauty department in the second-to-last aisle.
I have my doubts about the installation of the "every day" letters (each one seems... just slightly off) but the rest of the store looks very nice.
This is a new-build building that was actually completed about 10 years ago but the ground-floor retail space has been vacant since. This part of East Williamsburg has a number of other supermarkets, including a longtime Bravo directly across the street, but relatively few natural food-focused stores. There is also a full-size Whole Foods in Williamsburg, but it's across the neighborhood.
I visited on this store's second day of operation, and it was pretty busy. I haven't returned to any of the other Daily Shop stores, so I don't really have a sense of the format's performance in general.
Originally slated to open in December, the Williamsburg Whole Foods' opening date was pushed back shortly before the original planned opening date. It's unclear exactly why.
These are very small stores, and they feel small in a way that a lot of supermarkets in the city don't. You can see the small meat department here (and of course there are no service counters of any kind). This store is a little larger, for instance, but feels like a complete supermarket in a way that these Daily Shop stores don't. So the strategy here is to do something clearly different.
Dairy running along the back wall.
The decor is simple but attractive in these Daily Shop stores, and they're sleek and organized despite being small.
The registers are all self-checkout here, as is the standard for the Daily Shop locations.
It's clear that, if Amazon isn't pursuing Fresh and Go, they're putting their grocery focus elsewhere. And their current favorite format seems to be this Daily Shop one. The stores seem to mostly be executed decently well, but I just haven't observed how people are using them enough to know if this format really is the future of Amazon's brick-and-mortar retail.
But I like the Daily Shop branding, and it's a good way to distinguish the stores from traditional Whole Foods stores.
Don't miss this weekend's other news posts here!
Opened: February 26, 2026
Owner: Amazon
Previous Tenants: none
Cooperative: none
Location: 774 Grand St, Brooklyn, NY
Photographed: February 27, 2026
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