If you think Bi-Rite’s prices in SF are nose-bleedingly high, get ready to pass out over $55 chicken salad.
San Francisco’s the city that popularized the $15 salad, billionaire’s bacon, and coffee fades capable of emptying your checking account. SF is no stranger to hella expensive grocers either; the running joke among locals is that a quick jaunt to Mollie Stone’s for a granola bar and a canned beverage will cost you $23 — and one working kidney.
But surprisingly, SF has avoided homing in on America’s most expensive (and most viral; most cult-like; most clout-farmed) grocer as of late: Erewhon. With its celebrity-endorsed $23 smoothies and surprisingly affordable pizza slices, the Los Angeles-headquartered upscale grocery chain now has 12 physical locations — a nearly four-fold increase in grocers since 2018. (For context, up until 2014, the grover, which was originally founded on the East Coast, had a single location in Boston’s Fairfax District that opened in 1969.)
Booming sales and increased demand for Erewhon products have allowed the company to continue expanding. And it has its eyes set on San Francisco.
“A Taste of Erewhon in Your City. Coming soon,” reads a cryptic Instagram post published by the upscale grocers on September 30th. The post, which contains a carousel of screenshots of specific cities from Apple Maps, teases an estimated twenty yet-to-be-announced store openings or shipping hubs sprinkled across the country.
San Francisco is one such metro that’s expected to get a either sometime in the future, maybe even in the near future.
Another LA location is on the list, as well as locations set to open in cities that are surprising given Erewhon’s geographic insularity. Not only does the grocery expect to serve New Orleans, but Denver, Dallas, Phoenix, and Charleston are slated to get product — again, TBD when.
Whenever Erewhon’s San Francisco location opens, we’ll be delighted to see what hyperlocal inspiration they take from SF’s tech bro scene that’ll culminate in a $20-plus dollar tonic; we have no doubt, too, that the location will double as a gathering space for Bernedoodles and their dotting owners.
Feature image: Courtesy of Erewhon
UPDATE: Since publishing, Erewehon’s Instagram post received widespread coverage … and subsequent backlash for its apparent deceitful wording. The upscale grocer has, in addition to disabling comments, edited its post to clarify Erewehon will be *shipping* product to the covered metros, which include San Francisco, soon, and has no immediate plans to open dedicated stores in those cities (though Los Angeles specifically will see three new locations open between 2025 and 2026). We’d wager that fully mixed smoothies don’t handle freight air shipping all too well, but its new smoothie kits might.
