Like No Other Market - An Interview with Howie and Dan Glickberg of Fairway

How can two Glickbergs appear so different? The father—with his shaggy, gray hair, gruff demeanor, and mumble—clearly built his multi-million dollar business with his street savvy and industry experience. His son—a polished college guy with a casual but perfectly pronounced PR vocabulary, a clean shave, and a charming smile—brings a more academic approach to running things. However, after only five minutes of speaking to Howie and Dan Glickberg about their family business— Fairway Market —it is clear they are both passionate about the same goal: doubling the size of their business in the next three years.

Nathan Glickberg founded Fairway as a produce store near the corner of Broadway and 74th Street in the late 1930s. The store was passed down to his son Leo, who brought his son Howie into the business. Howie and his two vendor turned investor partners, David Sneddon and Harold Seybert, expanded the Broadway store to twice its size and began to sell specialty food items in addition to fresh produce. The store became a New York institution with its overcrowded aisles, aggressive shoppers and no nonsense workers. The three partners went on to open a second location off the West Side Highway in Harlem in 1995. The success of this second location led to the opening of the Plainview (2001) and Red Hook (2006) locations. In 2005, Howie’s son Dan joined the team and currently serves as executive vice president.

In January 2007, with Howie’s two partners retiring, Sterling Investment Partners acquired a majority stake in Fairway Market for an undisclosed amount; however the Glickbergs retained a significant equity stake in the business and will continue to lead the business going forward. This infusion of capital is being used to open four new locations, including the store in Paramus, NJ, scheduled to open next month.

Both Howie and Dan spoke with NY Report managing editor Daria Meoli about learning the family business, training employees to be Fairway people, and how they plan to retain the company’s unique qualities that customers have come to expect, while growing so rapidly.

Daria Meoli: Howie, how did you get started in the family business?

Howie Glickberg: In college, I used to work at the store on weekends. Back then, we had hanging scales in the produce department, not electronic scales. So if tomatoes were 59 cents a pound, and someone wanted nine ounces, I had to know immediately what the price was. I was really good at that. DM: Your first job was as a human calculator?

HG: Yeah, my father would look over my shoulder and if I was off by a quarter of a cent I got yelled at. Back then I had long hair, and for a few years my father and I didn’t get along very well. When I finished school in 1969, I was a stock broker for two or three years. At that point, my father had somebody running the store for him, but it wasn’t working out. It started to become just a regular supermarket, so it was a good time for me to come back into the business. When I came in, we emphasized all fresh products—we emphasized produce. We put in a cheese department when nobody else had fresh cheese. We put in a fresh deli department. We didn’t sell groceries when we first re-opened. It was a specialty store; there was no other store like it. When we opened up and produce was a third of the store, everybody in the industry said, “Hey, there’s not enough business up and down Broadway for you to survive.”

DM: Were they right?

HG: It was a good time for us because people were starting to understand fresh food. We not only survived, but we eventually took over the store next door and grew to 5,000 square feet.

Dan Glickberg: What they really had done was they took all the neighborhood markets and put them under one roof, and that’s something you really didn’t see before. It was a big draw for people. They didn’t have to go to two or three different parts of the city or on long walks to get all their fresh products.

DM: Dan, did you always want to be in the family business?