Self-proclaimed foodie and retired restaurant owner Janet Tekavec gushes over the Newton Farms grocery store at Freshfields Village between Kiawah and Seabrook islands.
“This is just nirvana,” the first-time visitor from Upstate New York said while scouring the aisles of Charleston-based Piggly Wiggly’s boutique supermarket. “This has everything and more as far as a major chain.”
That’s the attitude Piggly Wiggly hopes will carry over to its second Newton Farms planned for Isle of Palms when it opens before tourist season in 2014. Ditto for upscale newcomer Southern Season when it sets up its first store outside of home base Chapel Hill, N.C., in Mount Pleasant by this summer.
They are the latest specialty supermarkets headed for East Cooper, an area suddenly attracting a flurry of finer food merchants. Trader Joe’s opened in 2011 in the former Hungryneck Antique Mall and, by all accounts, appears to be a hit. It’s just around the corner from high-end grocer Whole Foods, one of only three in South Carolina.
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