ICE CREAM WARMS FOOD EMPORIUM

BOB BAUER

NEW YORK -- Food Emporium here is treating customers in its new Manhattan store to ice cream -- lots of it.

The department features 13 two-sided doors full of ice cream, according to Harold Berthold, director of grocery. He said that section accounts for 26% of the store space devoted to frozen foods.

In fact, the emphasis on frozen foods overall is strong at the chain's newest store. The L-shaped department dominates one corner of the 12,000-square-foot unit, which opened April 30.

"That frozen food department is one of the larger ones we have in the city," Berthold told SN. "Most of our city stores are pretty tight.

"Ice cream is a very popular item, as a category with so many brands, flavors and varieties. You've got the regular; you've the yogurt; you've got the ice milk; you've got the low-fat, the no-fat, the cholesterol-free; you've got more and more coming out. The novelties are expanding. So where we can, we give as much space to ice cream without suffering on the regular food items," Berthold explained.

Specialty items, such as sorbets and superpremium ice creams and yogurts, are plentiful throughout the ice cream section, including some regional varieties.

The upscale bent of the ice cream assortment should not be surprising, since the store is located at the base of the Trump Palace, a condominium complex with price tags of between $900,000 and $1.1 million per apartment.

Berthold said Food Emporium is "very heavily into" specialty food items throughout the chain. "It's due to the clientele we attract," he said. This particular store, he added, has more specialty items in all departments than other Food Emporiums.

The new store replaces an older, 7,000-square-foot Food Emporium which was directly across the street. Berthold said the company did some neighborhood marketing through its frequent shopper program to alert shoppers to the change.

"It went very well. I was there quite a few hours each day and I couldn't believe the number of new customers that came. They live in the area, but apparently they just did not want to cross the avenue. It was an old, outdated store and we couldn't really do anything to modernize it. It was just amazing how many new customers we attracted [with the new store]. It was a fantastic opening and it's holding pretty nicely."