“But one of these has seven grams of sugar in it, meaning it’s 25 percent sugar.”
That brought us to the cereal aisle, which Mr. Ruhlman considers the worst in the grocery
store; one chapter in his book is titled “Breakfast: The Most Dangerous Meal of the Day.”
“Cereal has this healthy halo around it, and it’s anything but healthy,” he said.
The growing sales of produce and prepared foods are a silver lining for supermarkets, which make a much higher profit margin from produce — about 40 percent for
prepared foods, compared with about 20 percent in the store over all, said Phil Lempert, the grocery-retailing expert who calls himself the Supermarket Guru.
Mr. Ruhlman predicts that much of what is sold in the center of the store — the cereal, canned soups, detergents
and Ziploc bags — will be largely bought online in the not-too-distant future as food shoppers become more accustomed to e-commerce
“He would gladly deposit a few Rock Cornish game hens (a new offering, bred by Donald Tyson in 1965) into the metal shopping cart, with its one wobbly wheel,
and eventually, a box of Uncle Ben’s wild rice for my mother, who loved to roast the hens stuffed with it,” Mr. Ruhlman writes of his father’s voracious appetite for anything new in the grocery store.
“It’s hard to find a place where people still know you by name,
but we do know many of our customers by name and that’s an important experience we provide for them.”
Mr. Ruhlman and I toured the frozen foods section and then, as a test of how up-to-date this ShopRite was, went on a search for kombucha.
