-By Michelle Moran

St. Louis-based Straub’s Market expands, opening its largest-format grocery store in the family’s 108-year business history, learning lessons about new construction along the way.

Store Stats
Number of Stores: 5
Location: St. Louis, Mo.
Year Established: 1901
Store Size: 12,000 square feet to 40,000 square feet
Number of Employees: 400
Owners: Jack Straub Jr. and Trip Straub
Web Site: www.Straubs.com

One thing that Trip Straub has learned in recent years is that opening a new store takes time, patience and a willingness to learn. Since the initial concept of Straub’s new 40,000-square-foot Ellisville, Mo., store began five years ago to its concrete birth this last December, the world has become a very different place.

Volatile global stock markets, failing housing markets and the highest unemployment rates in decades have all combined to paint a picture of the worst economic crisis since the Depression. Add to that rising food prices during 2008 that spiraled to the highest level in nearly 20 years, and one might wonder why anyone would open a new business — never mind the largest-format store in the company’s history.

For an independently operated family business, these remarkable economic changes could be devastating. Yet, Trip Straub, owner/VP of Straub’s Market, is buoyed by the reception the store has received in its service area, as well as the overwhelming response to the newest element of the store: Straub’s Culinary Center.

Straub was well under way in his plans for the fifth store and selected a location that would give the Straub’s full-service profile a West County presence.

“The new store allows us improved access to Straub’s customers who live west of Town & Country, and we look forward to attracting a new group of people who value our high-quality beef, restaurant-quality foods, fresh produce and specialty items,” he explains.

The Nielsen Company reports that while consumers are relying more and more on food staples and “value” items such as rice, noodles and pasta, more consumers are cooking from scratch rather than buying more expensive prepared “convenience” foods. Add to that indications that wine sales are on the rise, as consumers are staying home more, and you have the perfect storm for the rise in cooking classes, sales at prepared foods counters, and indulgence purchases focused on food and wine.

So, despite the change in world economics, the timing for Straub’s newest destination store may be more perfectly envisioned than it was five years ago.

Cooking From Scratch
Straub’s does not have a real estate department or building department — it’s a family business operating four existing stores. So, undertaking this task was a monumental decision.

“We all had full-time jobs before we started to build the store,” Straub begins. “I am a fairly detail-oriented person. But the level of detail it takes to complete a job like this is extraordinary. It became overwhelming.”


When construction commenced on March 10, 2008, it took nine months from groundbreaking to ribbon-cutting. And finally another member of the Straub family was brought to life.

“There’s been a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking,” Straub says. “Little design details you notice now that the store is operational. Some of the issues we ran into during construction were interesting — some were fun-interesting, others were you-gotta-be-kidding-me interesting.”

“I am much more educated about the process and now I know what to pay attention to early on. There are certain things you have to pay attention to, and I would also know how to speed the process up because I would be more confident,” Straub says of his new building expertise. “For us, it is different, we don’t build cookie-cutter stores.”

Family Business
The Ellisville location is the fifth for Straub’s, the first new store in over 40 years for this fourth-generation, family-owned four-store chain. The new Straub’s is three times the size of each of the four stores located in the Central West End, Clayton, Webster Groves and Town & Country.

“Over the past decade, I dedicated myself to visiting groceries all over the country and abroad,” explains Straub. “I’ve collected exciting ideas during my travels and conversations with business owners and consumers. My goal was to incorporate the very best of everything I’ve seen in an environment that appeals to St. Louisians.”

The new store was designed with the entire family in mind. Straub and his wife Terry have four children and their mark is indelible in the new location — as is the entire family tree.

The store’s restaurant is called Ellie’s Café & Loft, named for their 13-year-old daughter. Twelve-year old “Drew” has the William Andrew Straub Fine Meats department named for him (and for his great, great-grandfather and founder of the company); while 7-year-old Ben and 6-year-old Jack can find solace in J&B’s Candy Shop, which features every flavor of Jelly Belly imaginable as well as a bulk M&M station so you can create your own color profile based on holidays, school colors or your favorite sports team.

The entire store takes the community and the Straub family history to heart. The Clarkson Fish Market is named for the central road in the area, while the 1901 Tasting Room is aptly titled for the founding year of Straub’s. It’s here the community can host its own special meetings, dinners and tastings — Straub included a widescreen TV and Wi-Fi into the event space for business meetings — the store’s professionally trained chef is available for catering along with the many professionally trained experts who are part of Straub’s full-time culinary team.

Straub’s design consultants, Minneapolis-based Robert Gorski & Associates, created a store that not only is a beauty to look at and walk through, but one that also works well for the customer. The building is light and bright — high ceilings left with a somewhat industrial loft look and a floor-to-ceiling focus at the front on windows and doors that open to the parking lot in warmer seasons, creating an open-air market feeling. Even the store’s café can expand outside with two sets of swinging doors that open to service sidewalk dining tables.

Customers can enter through the café, stop for lunch and relax. Or hurried and hungry ranks can walk past checkout lanes directly into the prepared foods section to select items from the hot or cold buffets, or have a specialty sandwich or dish created before their eyes. Steps away are grab-and-go fixings for dinner, single-serve beverages and perfectly paired POS selections on the way out the door.

For those ready to shop the store, the main entrance brings nothing but color and desire. A bounty of fresh produce greets shoppers at the main entrance, which also features a 16-foot garage door so that in warmer spring and summer months, the produce section can grow outside the store.

“We’ll greet customers right at the parking lot with fresh food and bright colors so they know it’s not just another store,” Straub explains. “Most stores go counterclockwise. This store is clockwise. The driving force was the café. We wanted the café at the corner at the end of the shopping pattern.”

As with the other stores, a Zumex Orange Juicer sits center stage, but here in Ellisville, the bright orange has more space to make a statement. Customers can come and get their own fresh-squeezed orange juice. The fresh juice was just one of the weekly promotions Straub created to promote the store opening.

“Each week we featured a giveaway, from a free pound of fresh-roasted coffee beans [with $35 purchase] to a half gallon of fresh-squeezed juice,” Straub says as we begin the tour. He stops to greet a team member stocking produce and then again to explain the differences in coffee roasts to a customer pondering her selection.

The newest Straub’s is three times the original store formats — but there is nothing lost in service or attention to service. The store is staffed by about 125 associates who know their products, their departments and their customers. The additional berth allowed Straub to increase organic selections, build out bulk food departments and add central customer-centric departments such as on-site coffee roasting and a general merchandise area that includes specialty housewares, including CIA and Staub cookware.

“We joke that the Staub is our own private label French cast enamel … just misspelled. We also carry Caldrea and dedicate an entire end cap to the product. It keeps us distinguished from the Mrs. Meyer’s range,” Straub explains. “When you walk through the aisle, all specialty product is integrated into the store at eye level.”

The store is designed so that no matter where a customer is standing, they feel as though they are not within a department but instead a store-within-the-store.

“If you look around 360 degrees from where you are standing, you feel as though you are in a store that specializes in that particular category — whether it’s seafood, meat, prepared foods or produce,” Straub says.

Throughout the store, customers will discover additional specialty products on end caps designed with high-end furniture-styled fixtures that draw attention to products and whisper to consumers the high-quality value of the products themselves. Steps away from the produce department is an olive oil and vinegar section with more than 18 feet of product — Straub’s next step is an olive oil tasting station to help customers determine the profile of oil that best suits their palate.

Gorgeous furniture fixtures set the stage for Straub’s, making it clear this is not another traditional grocery experience. In front of the seafood market (a 16-foot full-service department with 8-foot self-serve) is a 4-foot-by-8-foot furniture display stocked with seasonal product that rotates out weekly — Republic of Tea, another St. Louis resident, held a strong foothold the day we visited.

“We support local business and like to provide our customers with the best local choices available,” Straub explains.


Room to Grow
If you visit any of Straub’s other locations, you are amazed at the volume they stock in such a small footprint — never mind the back-end operations that must be accommodated in such small quarters. The new Ellisville location is a dream come true for the back of the house.

“There are two things that brought a tear to my eye when I saw this location,” Straub reveals. “The freezer space and the parking lot. Now we can do palettes. We have a huge space for the back of the house. It’s the first store with rear-feed on the dairy.”

The new location also allows for a wider range of wines — more than 1,500 varieties — along with a tasting bar and full-service cheese department (all other locations have self-serve cheese departments). In addition, there is a 1,100-bottle temperature-controlled cellar for high-end wines adjacent to The 1901 Room event space that’s also used for cheese and wine classes. Every week, the store hosts Friday Uncorked from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., offering tastings of specific wines and varietals.

The deli area is not new, but Ellisville has a new wood-fired pizza oven and a commercial kitchen that rivals the best restaurant in St. Louis. There’s also a 12-foot granite hot bar, 16-foot self-serve hot and cold bars, 20 feet of single-serve drinks, made-to-order sandwiches, an open grill and grab-and-go area. Each of Straub’s stores has its own mini commissary, and each location services the others with their specialties. The Clayton store specializes in soups, which it creates and packages for all locations. The Ellisville location offers up the soups in grab-and-go packaging as well as the company’s first 12-well soup bar.

In Ellisville, aside from the coffee roasting, customers are also treated to an open baking department right next door to a Bissinger’s Chocolate service counter.


Another first in Ellisville is the SCC — Straub’s Culinary Center — a 32-seat classroom perfectly equipped with state-of-the-art technology that makes it suitable for both the store’s own cooking classes and private corporate meetings.

“We have a business group that meets every Tuesday at 6:30 a.m. for breakfast and a presentation,” Straub says.

The culinary center is located upstairs from the café, just steps away from the 5,000-square-foot mezzanine that holds Ellie’s Loft — additional seating/meeting space above the café that features a gorgeous stone fireplace and floor-to-ceiling windows. The walkway to the classroom is open so students can see the entire store floor beneath them, bright and bursting with product.

Because of its proximity to Anheuser-Busch, Straub’s has access to great brewmasters ready to teach beer and food pairing, cooking with beer, and other classes that have been highly successful since the store’s Dec. 3, 2008, opening. Other classes are selling out fast; overseen by business development director Beth Huch, they include courses in sushi, baking, cheese and wine pairing, mixology, knife skills, and a cookbook club.

Competitive Edge
The Ellisville location allows Straub to bring the store’s reputation and additional departments to a completely new standard. There are seven aisles of grocery, an aisle for frozen, circular coffee and cheese, bulk foods, bulk candy, three aisles of health & beauty, and more.

For the past 12 years, Straub’s has specialized in the finest roast coffee selection working with Kaldi’s Coffee Roasting Company. But two years ago, a partnership between Schnuck Markets Inc. and Kaldi Coffee with in-store coffee bars left Straub looking for private label alternatives.

“We began working with a local microroaster 10 years ago, but they began to work with Schnuck’s and were brought in-house. So now with the Ellisville location, we’re able to bring our whole-bean roasting in-house, and all the coffee we serve at the café is Straub’s.”

Straub’s has two labels: Fair Trade, certified organic Ellie’s Café Coffee and Straub’s Coffee Co., which is created daily by the store’s professional roaster who works directly on the store floor, turning the coffee department into entertainment.

“The theater element really drives customers,” Straub says.

Now the Ellisville location services all Straub’s locations, eliminating the need for outsourced coffee roasting.

“We have a lot of competition in this area, from Trader Joe’s to Whole Foods, but the comments on our stores have been the coolest. They love the Ellisville location and what we bring to the market,” Straub says. “Our biggest task is to break shopping patterns. Straub’s has always had high-priced product — that image is correct — but we also have staples that run the same price as the competition: a gallon of milk for $2.98, Oscar Meyer and traditional cereals. We also have value-added product that demands a higher price.”

But Straub’s customers seem to understand the value — the family’s secret recipe chicken salad sells for $9.99 a pound and sells better today than it did when it was first introduced in the 1970s.

“The same woman has been making it since we started — Joyce Scheirding — we call her the Chicken Salad Lady,” Straub smiles. “When she began, she was making it in her house, then in a converted garage, now she makes it on-site.”

Straub’s customers find the chicken salad as “Straubalicious” as the store-designed T-shirts call out. It’s easy to understand their loyalty when you shop the Ellisville store or any other location where the people all seem to know each other’s names — customers and associates alike.

In the Ellisville store, Straub pauses to ask a woman if there’s anything he can help her find.

She pauses for a moment, then simply smiles.

“I just had to see it,” she says, gesturing around. “I am a Kingshighway Straub’s shopper. It’s so big! I am truly amazed.”