In 2019, we opened in Industry City, which is our event space; it’s also a grocery and cafe with a Mediterranean wine bar. We make our own pita bread there, and we do a bit more of what people had been asking for but we didn’t have the space for at Atlantic Avenue. 

Can you tell me a bit more about the Levant Region, where most of your products are from? 

My grandfather would bring his own tahini, his own bulgar wheat, olives and olive oil, all from Lebanon. We do a lot more of that today. Last year, we opened our spirit store in Industry City which features a ton of wines from that area of the world, which is very underrepresented in the market. People don’t think of the Middle East as wine-producing countries, but Morocco and Lebanon were settled by the French for a very long time, so they have a very rich, old wine culture. Turkey also has a very robust wine culture. 

Even within the stores today — and we just opened up a kiosk at Pier 57 — a lot of the snackier foods are from Lebanon: little packaged salt-and-pepper cashews or healthy bars, for example. These are things that are newer in the past decade. Previous to that, we did a lot of oil and bulgur and spices and bulk items. Today, the market has shifted away from bulk toward more grab-and-go packaging, either fresh or grocery-style. We bring a huge variety of soda and water from Lebanon, with Middle Eastern flavors like tamarind or mango, as well as bubbly waters with things like rose or orange. 

The deli, which we opened in ‘86, has grown and grown as a percentage of our sales. People want to come in and buy things that they don’t want to make themselves. And, as the community and the US market change, so do the products that we bring in. So, a lot of the things that I’ve always brought are now being used in my deli items or my grab-and-go items. 

Do you think Covid had anything to do with this shift? 

If you’d asked me five years ago, I’d say people were definitely cooking less. But the hard-core cooks, like me (it doesn’t matter what’s happening around me, that’s what I do when I come home), were still coming in for spices and olive oil. The day-to-day customers, the people in their 20s or 30s, are grabbing a prepared meal, but it wasn’t a prepared meal that had been on the supermarket shelves for five years; it was something that we made that day. 

Let’s talk about Sahadi’s neighborhoods. How did you choose Industry City, and how have you seen the Atlantic Avenue neighborhood change over the years?  

We weren’t really looking to expand. Industry City chose us. They came to us with a big space, and they asked if we were interested. The first time they asked, we looked at the traffic and said, “Absolutely not.” When they came back to us a few years later, we looked at their numbers. Industry City is a great location, right between my warehouse and my other store, so it was really easy to fulfill there. We were also able to do a lot of new things there. The cafe was new to us, the bar was new to us, the pita bread was new to us, so we wanted to make sure we had plenty of support. So, it was a really great fit. 

It was also a great fit for us because they were trying to curate a really special brand of retailers that were also making something. We make our own granola there, and we package a lot of items there. We do a lot of things there that we don’t do at Atlantic Avenue because we have the space to do it there. We do all the grab-and-go there, and then we fulfill all of the locations out of that location. Industry City is like our commissary. 

The neighborhood of Industry City has changed drastically. When I was growing up, you wouldn’t even go down to that neighborhood. It was straight-out industrial. A lot of the buildings were abandoned, and it was not well maintained. We put our warehouse there in 2000, and when my husband first told me he bought that building, I could not believe it. I worried about him every night coming home, and now there are million-dollar warehouses all around. The 20-year difference has been lightyears for Sunset Park. I love the location. I love the fact that it’s near the ferry, central to the train and the bus, and it’s on the waterfront. I love having the campus. I love knowing there’s support there.  If a light goes out, it’s not my problem; whereas on Atlantic Avenue, everything is my problem. 

Atlantic Avenue has also changed drastically. When I was a young kid, my mother worried incessantly about my dad coming home in the middle of the night by himself because Brooklyn Heights was not an amazing neighborhood. It has obviously become a gorgeous, historic area. There’s every reason why it should’ve come back and come back stronger than it had been previously. It’s a beautiful neighborhood and has, arguably, the most eclectic, bright, engaging people. The customers are so interested and interesting and well-traveled. It’s a great place to market food in because you learn as much from the customers as you give them. It’s very collaborative. A lot of the items we have on the shelves are collaborations where a customer came in and said, “I brought you a jar. I know it’s empty, but it was the most amazing product on earth.” And then, we see if we can source it. 

My brother and I decided to divide and conquer, and since I love to cook, I’m mostly at Industry City. A lot of our customers here are from south Brooklyn, and I’m from Bay Ridge, so a lot of those are friends and neighbors. 

As the customers became more knowledgeable about food, we could go more high-end and carry products we didn’t sell 25 years ago. It’s really great that we’re able to continually grow and evolve and curate new and interesting products on a regular basis; otherwise, it would get really stale after all these years. 

The Atlantic Ave location is nestled among a lot of other Middle Eastern markets and restaurants. How has this shaped that store?

It’s a funny little one-block piece of history. Most of the stores on the avenue have not changed that much. We moved in ‘48 from Manhattan. We were in the Little Syria area of Washington Street in Manhattan. My grandfather decided that, when they started building the tunnel and the noise and the dust that came along with that, it just wasn’t worth it. They moved to Atlantic Avenue primarily because our cathedral is five blocks away. We are Christian, and St. Nick’s Cathedral is on State Street. Also, Our Lady of Lebanon Maronite Catholic Church is here. At the time, a lot of Christians were on Washington Street, and they chose Downtown Brooklyn because it made sense. I mean, where do immigrants go? They go to their cultural centers, which is a religious organization, a social organization, somewhere they feel comfortable.

Most people came after we did, but they’ve been there for years. Everyone has their little niche market. Without a doubt, I have the American market. Oriental Caterers does a lot of catering with the embassies and things like that; he skews more Arabic, even though we have a lot of the same products. And Damascus was originally known for doing their own baking. So we all have our own little piece of the pie. I don’t think the neighborhood could support ten more Middle Eastern groceries. But I do think, within the framework of what we have, we are the most active in the neighborhood. Our hummus is at every school event; we’re part of the fabric of the neighborhood in every location. 

I want people to come to us socially as well as for groceries. During hurricanes, there are always people at Sahadi’s. Why? They want to get out of the house a little bit; they bring their kids; they have a coffee; yes, they might buy something. Part of that was my dad, who has been retired for five years. Everyone knows my father. I don’t think there’s a person in the food world in Brooklyn who does not know Charlie Sahadi. We’re also very welcoming; we always have samples out; you can stay half the day in the store, and we’re happy to have you. Lots of those customers have become friends, and we have lots of multi-generational customers where the granddaughter will come in and say, “I remember when I was 3 and my grandmother would bring me in here!” That kind of thing is what makes Sahadi’s, Sahadi’s. 

So, we’re very much a community center and a family establishment. In every location, there’s a family member, almost 24/7. My son, my daughter, me, my brother, my husband, my brother-in-law, we’re everywhere. If you remove the ‘family thing,’ you might be happy just buying everything from Amazon. You don’t need us anymore. The truth is that you can get tahini dropped in your backyard with a drone. If you do it right now, you’ll have it tomorrow morning. So, what can I offer that’s keeping us relevant? It’s the rest of the package. It isn’t the only thing — my tahini is probably better — but you have to offer something different to be part of the food world today; with the Sam’s Clubs and the Costcos, there are a lot of other options. So, our thing is that we’re still a family. People call and they’re like, “I can’t believe you’re answering the phone!” and I’m like, “Well, somebody’s gotta answer it!” I guess people expect the ownership to be absentee, but we’re everywhere. 

Is there an underrated product or something you wish people knew more about or purchased more? 

I have my favorites, just like everyone. I have my go-to products that people are always asking, “How do you use that?” That’s one of the reasons we wrote the book, because people were constantly asking, “I don’t understand what I should do with this? I bought it for a recipe, I used one teaspoon, and it’s been sitting in my closet for five years.” So, my go-to products that I think people don’t use are the pomegranate molasses and aleppo pepper. I love them. I feel like they both add something extra to a dish, and yet, people are constantly coming up to me asking, “Why do you sell such large quantities of this pepper?” If you know what to do with it and use it regularly, you can use it up. Same with the pomegranate molasses —  it’s an intense flavor that adds a little zing to salad dressings, baked goods, and sangria. A lot of food is education, teaching and sharing. 

That’s the missing component, to me, with online shopping and with more impersonal shopping. There’s no one to have a dialogue with. A bunch of products that I use on a regular basis, people will come back and tell me, “I did what you told me to do, and I used it on a butternut squash!” But if we’d never had that conversation, that whole experience never happened. 

I just used your pomegranate molasses in a gingerbread, and it was incredible! Where do you see Sahadi’s going next?

Once we settled Industry City down, the kiosk was our first business development project that is not close by. We’ve gotten a lot of requests for kiosk-style openings. New York City is changing so drastically that people want amenities directly in their buildings now. They want it to be right there. So we had a meeting yesterday about putting small-format stores or kiosks in some of these newer high-end developments. There’s a lot of development happening all over Brooklyn, and in Sunset Park, and things like movie houses will go in and need food service. They don’t want to walk, you know, seven blocks to get it. We’ve learned that people want a bit more grocery and not just kiosk. The interesting thing about the kiosk is that it’s the first place we ever opened with a customer who is not the Sahadi customer. The customer is a tourist. 

It didn’t occur to us that it would be mostly tourists. They just come into wherever has the smallest line, and then they go, which is fine. They’re great to talk with, but they’re not going to come back unless they come back to New York in five years. We’re working on delivery from the Pier so that we can get the Sahadi’s customer, which we do get a few of, but it’s kind of a hike across the West Side. 

So, it’s been a good learning experience. I don’t think that we would open another large-format model. I think that the big stores are very labor intensive, and they’re very intense in terms of ownership on the floor. I have a very young, bright management team, but I don’t want to stretch them too thin, and big stores inherently stretch them thinner, whereas smaller stores or kiosks just have a lead, or managers can stop by, it’s a bit different. 

This is how they’ll grow if they intend to grow at all. I am not intending to. This was my last hurrah, the Pier. So I think, down the road, we’ll be providing consulting and back-end support and food education (we’re working on getting some educational videos up on YouTube). That’s more of where I’d be going, but definitely doing one project at a time and making sure each thing is solid before going on to the next one. Slow and steady wins the race.