Grocery Stores: An American Miracle

The scale of the American food system is something to marvel at: There are about 38,000 grocery stores in the country, which together bring in roughly $670 billion in sales each year.

But to better understand this system, it’s useful to break it down into its component parts: every sticky conveyor belt, every misting rack, every refrigerated dairy case. That’s essentially what the journalist and cookbook writer Michael Ruhlman does in his recent book, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America. In the book, he profiles Heinen’s, an upscale, midsize chain with locations in Ohio and Illinois whose sales numbers are a bit more comprehensible. At one Heinen’s where Ruhlman hangs around for his reporting, in the suburbs of Cleveland, roughly 12,000 customers make their way to the checkouts each week, each typically adding $35 to $50 at a time to the store’s $675,000 in weekly sales.

encompasses more than sales data, though. It is also a study of grocery stores’ business model, a memoir (Ruhlman writes at length about his father’s love for browsing supermarket aisles), and a history of how modern-day grocery stores came to be. Ruhlman plots their development from the late 1800s, when they stocked about 200 products, to today, when they typically have more than 40,000 items. During that span of time, the grocery store has swallowed up a series