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The soft serve at Orchard Grocer is made with cashews, rice milk, olive oil, and sugar. On a hot Saturday, the line for it runs out the door. Most people waiting aren’t thinking about what’s in it. They’re thinking about how good it tastes.
That’s the point.
Orchard Grocer is an all-vegan deli and grocery at 78 Orchard Street on New York’s Lower East Side. Before any product reaches its shelves, it has to pass two rules: it must be vegan and it must be palm oil free.
Sisters Erica and Sara Kubersky have been running vegan businesses since 2001, when they opened MooShoes in a time when the word itself still needed explaining. “No one really knew the word vegan,” Erica said of those years. “And now everyone’s grandmother knows.”
The shoe store moved to Orchard Street years later and the sisters opened Orchard Grocer in the same building in 2017. The store is growing significantly every year — Sara puts the most recent year-over-year sales growth at 30-40 percent.
I’ve walked through a lot of stores where the mission and the merchandising never meet, so I love to see how at Orchard Grocer they’re the same thing. New makers get their first real audience. The neighborhood gets somewhere to go every day. And a street full of small businesses gets one more reason to stay that way.
We talked to Erica and Sara about their approach to business and their retail growth strategies.
1. Let your values make the inventory decisions
For Erica and Sara, veganism was a way of life long before there was any soft serve to sell. The grocery business grew out of that commitment, not the other way around.
At Orchard Grocer, “vegan” describes how the store buys, what it turns down, and how it operates. The store’s ban on palm oil shows what that commitment looks like in practice.
“There are certain issues that were important to us growing up in the vegan community,” Erica said. “It was just clear to me how much disruption that was having on the environment. And of course I love orangutans.”
A hard rule also hands you a decision you no longer have to make.“It’s another way also to edit what we offer a bit, too, which from a business perspective does make our lives a little easier,” Erica said.
The filter brings in customers the store never went looking for, including shoppers who aren’t vegan and aren’t trying to be. “Maybe the vegan thing is too hard, but the palm oil seems very like, sure, I could sign on to that,” Erica said. “So it’s just another way of our values bringing in a certain clientele that we weren’t expecting.”
The rules don’t loosen as the business grows. Asked what she’d protect as things change, Sara answered, “We’re always going to be vegan. We’re always going to be palm oil free.”
When your values shape decisions, answers get clearer.
2. Become the store other independent businesses need
Orchard Grocer competes on discovery, and the sisters have built the buying around it from the start.
“We are an independent business, so we are always going out of our way to find the other smaller independent businesses,” Erica said. “We’re really trying to be a hub for that. That’s something that’s very important to us.”
Large retailers can offer scale. Their small store offers what scale never reaches. “What we could offer people is products that they’re not going to find in other places,” Sara said. Independent brands get in-person customers and community.
“If an independent brand wants to pop up here and show their stuff for the day or sell it, we’re always happy to host them,” Sara said. For a new maker, that’s a valuable introduction to a real audience. For Orchard Grocer, it keeps the inventory moving.
“I really do love that we’re able to work with other people starting businesses and launching new products, and they get so excited to be in our tiny store,” Sara said. “Watching their enthusiasm, it’s just so fun.”
Every new product brings a new relationship and every relationship adds to the store’s energy.
3. Win people with the product
The sisters’ approach to soft serve captures how the entire store works. Customers don’t have to think about what’s missing or make a compromise. The soft serve is good, so they buy it. It has been one of Orchard Grocer’s best sellers since day one, “a top seller to vegans and non-vegans alike,” as Sara put it.
That lightness was deliberate. “We really wanted a place that wasn’t too serious, that showed that vegan can be fun,” Sara said.
The deli follows a similar approach. “We knew that what’s going to keep people coming every day is the option of eating,” Erica said. “So they weren’t necessarily going to come every day for groceries, but they were going to come every day to eat.”
All that daily traffic does a second job, bringing people past the shoe store the sisters have run since 2001. “We opened the grocer and deli in hopes that it’ll bring people in more often, and then they’ll actually browse shoes in person, which is something a lot of people just don’t do anymore,” Sara said. Daily traffic is an asset, and each concept borrows from it.
4. Trust your gut and check your sales reports
Twenty-five years in the vegan business community gave the sisters real conviction about what customers want and the opening menu is the evidence. Nine years in, much of what they put up on day one is still selling.
Instinct still guides their inventory decisions, but now insights from Square tells them whether they were right. Rather than waiting on a bookkeeper, Sara pulls the numbers herself. “We are ones to just naturally go by our feelings, and our feelings have been really wrong sometimes,” she said.
“[With Square], you could do the top 10 sellers, the top 20, you could do all of them, and just put the timeframe in,” she said. “It’s really helpful to evaluate if you make a menu change, what’s working and what’s not working, instead of just going by your feelings.”
Erica has the same perspective on buying, where enthusiasm is hardest to override. “There’ll be certain products that we’ll bring in because we’re really excited about them, and then we have to believe the reports.”
Their gut determines the first order, but the reports from Square decides the reorder.
5. Be a good neighbor
Orchard Street is part of the store and Erica talks about it like a true New Yorker. “We are Orchard Grocer because we are on Orchard Street, which is one of the greatest streets in New York City,” she said. “It still has that kind of older New York feel.”
Being a good neighbor is also an operating standard. It shows up in the small details that make a neighborhood work, starting with picking up the phone. “You can’t call any place and get anyone on the phone anymore,” Erica said. “I like that we, for the most part, do pick up our phones. It feels like you’re coming to a real place.”
The staff at Orchard Grocer makes that experience possible. Many were customers before they were employees, and are vegan themselves, so they often arrive with deep product knowledge. They also tend to stay, which is unusual in an industry known for high employee turnover.
“That means they’ve gotten to know our regulars, they’ve gotten to know our products really well, and they’ve also learned how to keep the line moving,” said Erica. That changes what a wait feels like. A staffer talks to a customer about a product, the person behind them joins in, and the line stops feeling like a line.
Square supports the same relationships from both ends of the counter. New hires get comfortable on the Square Register fast. “The interface is intuitive,” Sara said, which is important when selling made-to-order sandwiches next to packaged groceries. Square Loyalty gives regular customers something to work toward, and when someone writes in with a problem, the team can pull up their history.
“We can look at their history and just learn more about the customer and see why this issue is affecting them,” Sara explained.
A store that takes care of its neighbors becomes a place where neighbors become regulars.
A neighborhood grocery store only works if everyone shows up
Orchard Grocer keeps evolving. Espresso was new this year, a dining area is going in next, and the shelf turns over constantly. What doesn’t change is the underlying philosophy of how to run a successful grocery store.
That thread runs through every one of their strategies. Sara and Erica’s values narrow down what they buy, that narrowed buy makes room for independent makers, and independent makers give people a reason to come in.
“If you want independent businesses around, you really have to go in person and shop in person,” said Sara. “Or else the whole streetscape is going to change.”
Today, Orchard Grocer is on Vegan Food and Living‘s list of the 35 best vegan restaurants in New York City for 2026, and small brands call a spot on their shelves a win. The sisters turned their values into something people line up for. Now those values hold the door open for everyone else.
