Jeff Brown on Grocery Innovation, Social Impact & the Power of Giving Back

In this episode of Uncorked: Wine, Business & Life, filmed in the Saddlehill Winery Tasting Room, hosts Bill Green and Jerrold Colton sit down with longtime friend and Philadelphia business leader Jeff Brown, the fourth-generation grocer behind Brown’s ShopRite and Di Bruno Bros.Jeff opens up about his journey from growing up in Northeast Philly to transforming a small family grocery business into a community-driven powerhouse that serves both underserved neighborhoods and upscale markets. He discusses working directly with President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama to shape national food-access policy and how that partnership helped launch Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign.The conversation dives into Jeff’s Uplift workforce initiative—an inspiring program providing second chances to formerly incarcerated individuals and achieving a remarkable 98% success rate. Jeff also talks about serving on Governor Tom Wolf’s Workforce Development Board, tackling issues like inflation, tariffs, and SNAP cuts, and how policy impacts everyday families.From running for Mayor of Philadelphia, to acquiring Di Bruno Bros., to raising four sons alongside his wife and business partner Sandy, Jeff’s story is one of heart, perseverance, and purpose.

Introduction and Guest Welcome

Welcome to Uncorked Wine Business and Life with Bill Green. I'm Gerald Colton and we are at Saddle Hill Winery in Voorhees, New Jersey. As usual, we have a great guest for you today and is a guy who is, of course, a good friend of Bill Green's and of mine as well. A person who's really entrenched and well known throughout the Philadelphia and South Jersey community and a whole lot of interesting endeavors. So, Bill, why don't you introduce today's guest?

A Longstanding Friendship

Yeah, this is really a special one for me. My good friend Jeff Brown. It goes back a lot of years, but it's actually a little bit creepy because we lived in Voorhees, right? And then I moved to Cherry Hill, and the next thing I know, he literally moves like five doors away in Cherry Hill. Then I move to Philadelphia. He literally moves across the street. Then I had already had a house down the shore, and he moves down the shore. But anyway, it's my pleasure and my honor to welcome you on Uncorked.

We've been friends for, shit, I don't know, 30 years, a long time. We have a lot of mutual interests. I think the family values and a lot of other things that you and I share. Our wives are great friends, but you and I talk a lot of business, but it's more than just business. You go all in. Your resume is so impressive. 37 years in the grocery business, taking over a much smaller family business, building it. You're on a lot of boards. You've done some great things in your community. And we're going to talk about all that today.

One of the things that I really love is when I hear about Governor Wolf appointing you on the board of the workforce development of the state of Pennsylvania. That's just awesome. But it's just one thing that you do of dozens to be involved in your community to give back because you've been so blessed, like many of us as well. So Jeff, welcome to Uncorked.

Thanks for having me, Bill. I like your taste in real estate. I think you're way ahead of seeing where the action is. So I just delegate that to you and I just follow you wherever you go. Pretty easy, right?

It's easy, right? You know, being in real estate, we're talking about real estate. It was funny how I never got a commission. That's something you don't give much commission. Yeah, I'm not big on commission. You're not. But just to say you were not stalking him. I do like Amy, I might be stalking Amy, Bill.

It's funny because in this community there is another Jeff Brown who we're close with. We had his brother Sid on as a guest. And there's another Sandy Brown who's married to Sid. And you, you're married to the lovely Sandy. So you have a name that carries a lot of weight in more ways than one. Well, he's supermarket Jeff Brown. I'm the grocery Jeff. They're trucking Brown.

Early Life in the Grocery Trade

Hey Jeff, go back. You grow up in northeast Philadelphia. You go to Babson. Go back to the early years and how you get started in the grocery business with your dad and kind of like all the stuff happens that makes you pivot.

So my dad was an old time grocer. His dad was a third generation grocer. The old time way was you wake up like four in the morning, you go to the market, you buy the stuff, you go to the store, you run the store and you're literally there every hour the store is open. He's home like nine o'clock at night. That's his routine seven days a week.

If I wanted to see my dad, I had to wait up for him to come home. Then I would sit with him. He would have dinner like 9:30 or something, I'd sit with him and he would tell me the blow by blow of everything he did that day. I was mesmerized by it. How he did things that seemed like they were risky or that the average person wouldn't do, and his love for his customers and his employees. Big imprint on my life. Of course by the time I was eight, the only way I could see him is I go to work with him. So on the weekends I would go to work with him at eight years old in an inner city store where some of the employees carried weapons because of the crime level.

Where was it? It was in West Philly, at 40th and Girard. So he would take me there and you know my dad, windows down, unlocked doors, kissing and hugging everyone. Never had a problem? Well, a couple problems, but not bad. He would leave me by myself to work and the workers would teach me the business. Oddly enough, even though we were way different, coming from different lifestyles and different neighborhoods, they had a fondness for me. They took me under their wing and all the different workers looked forward to having time to teach me what they did.

That's how I learned the business and fell in love with really the people. I love business. It doesn't have to be the grocery business, but I really, really love the people. When you look at the work I do and the philanthropic work I do, it all centers around how I could use what I'm good at to help them do better.

Four Generations of Grocers

Bill, I want to get into all that philosophy with Jeff, but you are fourth generation, so your father was already third generation. How did it all get started? So my great grandfather from Russia and my grandfather from Poland came and my grandfather couldn't find a job because he didn't speak good English and he struggled. A little racism, maybe they didn't want him. So my great grandfather and grandfather opened a little small grocery store at Third in Oregon because they could get it cheap.

The whole thing about immigrants and inner city locations, your startup costs are low, the real estate's inexpensive and you could buy, let's say a failed store and get in pretty cheap. That's how a lot of people made their living. In that generation, it didn't go past that. It was really my dad who was more of an innovator.

They started taking him to work at eight years old in their little inner city store, 32nd and Berks, also quite a neighborhood. Same deal. They left him by himself to learn the business. He was telling them that the chain stores have bigger stores and they have more offerings and they have self service offerings and all the different things that were modern at that time. He modernized the family business.

Joining the Wakefern Cooperative

In my generation, I did start out working for my dad. He had shopping bags and it was clear to me that that was not going to be a long term business. ShopRite was on the horizon of coming to this market and I thought there was just no way that we could compete with them. It actually ended up that right after college, I was his CFO for about two years. We actually sold the business and my dad retired.

So my business is actually a startup. My dad taught me what I knew, but it was a startup. Which is a very interesting story because I'm 23 years old, I have no job because my dad sold the business that I worked for. I meet Sandy, so she's going out with an unemployed dude. I go to Wakefern and the youngest person I meet with is in their 70s and I'm 23 years old. I told them I thought I'd be of value to them as an entrepreneur to bring their grocery stores to Philadelphia. They just stared at me. "What's your net worth?" Practically nothing. "And how old are you?" 23 years old. We ended up working it out and they gave me a chance.

The Cooperative Business Model

Talk about how that first thing happened and explain for our listeners and our viewers kind of the Wakefern model. Because people don't really realize, you know, I own all these supermarkets, but it's a cooperative.

When you hear cooperatives, the first thing that comes to mind to me is farming cooperatives, where a bunch of little farmers get together and they build processing plants and distribution businesses to sell their products and to get more than if they relied on a third party. The grocery industry at one time did it as a way to defend themselves against the giant retailers of their time.

When Wakefern started, there were a bunch of little North Jersey operators with small stores. At that time, A&P had a monopoly in the grocery business. A&P's retail price was lower than their wholesale price. So the little guys got together and used to take trucks into one of their garages and split up the order to try to get their cost down. They finally formalized it and started a co-op. What's unusual about this business model, especially in the consolidation and M&A and global systems, is these are still a bunch of family businesses. We still do everything together. We essentially run this business, unfortunately, through committees of family businesses and argue over what would be best for our individual customers and our individual families. And this year, Wakefern Co-op will do about 22 billion in revenues at a retail level.

Amongst how many stores? About 300 stores. All over the country? No, Northeast, Mid-Atlantic region. About nine states.

Serving Diverse Communities

Given the fact that we have a Cherry Hill ShopRite actually right across the street here, and you have an inner city store, the models and the merchandising is much different. How does that work in those Wakefern boardrooms when you really have to thread that needle? It’s be good for you and good for me. That's where the fighting comes in. But what's interesting, if you look at our competitors that don't fight, there's a CEO and he lays down the law and it is what it is. People like that leave out people because there's no one fighting for them like my lower income inner city customers. In a big corporation, they would have no one defending them.

I'm there. If they want to do something that's not good for my customers, I will fight for them because what's good for my customers is good for my business. That's what happens times 45 different families. There's a lot of debate, let's put it that way.

But there is even though the purchasing part of your business is basically handled by Wakefern—I mean, they cut deals—you could still deviate and be entrepreneurial and go outside to what, like 2 or 3% of your overall purchases can be outside of? So Wakefern, our shareholders agreement requires 85% of everything we buy be through Wakefern. The other 15% is to be a good entrepreneur, to be a good server of your customers. In my case, I'm in West Philly, North Philly. That's not only diverse, but diverse from people all over the world, because immigrants from all over the world go to places like Philadelphia.

I have a big Muslim customer base. I have Western Africans, I have Jamaicans, I have people from all over. If I'm a good entrepreneur, I will get to know them and know what they eat, what they celebrate, what their religion is, and operate my business and merchandise my store to serve them. That's exactly what I've done.

As we continue on this path, part of our show, of course, is wine. As we sit here Saturday, is wine or liquor part of those things you go outside your 85% on? Yes, almost. We have 19 stores. Almost all the stores have liquor licenses. Just like every other product, we merchandise the store for the neighborhood. And wine is definitely part of what we do.

Wine Tasting: Saddle Hill Vintner's Reserve

So it's a good time to introduce our first wine. We always start with this wine. This is the Saddle Hill. Since we're here at Saddle Hill, this is a Vintner's Reserve. It's a Bordeaux blend. Cheers. Jeff, thanks. Welcome. Thanks for joining us. It's good. Nice, right? Yeah, it has a complexity to it that I didn't expect.

And Jeff, it's really interesting because this is a Jersey wine that Bill produces right here. And that's pretty competitive with a whole lot of other stuff and things you'll get out of Napa. We're very proud of you.

What I say to people, I mean, this is a more expensive wine. We retail this at 56, but if you go into a wine shop, a liquor store, and you go 30, 35 dollar bottle of wine, the Jersey wines and the Napa wines are going to be the same. Jersey can't make a 100 dollar bottle. We're pushing the limits. Some of these grapes came from the west coast that we blend in with our grapes to enhance it. You can call wine Jersey Wine if 75% of the grapes are from New Jersey.

Community Listening and Halal Certification

Speaking of percentages, I want to dig down a little bit. The 15% that you don't have to buy from Wakefern. Are your margins better or is it more of accommodation? It varies. And I'll give you an interesting example. So maybe it's 20 years ago. I'm in one of my stores in Northwest Philadelphia, and it's predominantly an African American store, and we have maybe 15, 20% are African American Muslims. So I'm asking my team that the ladies in the head coverings are not buying our meat. Do we know why?

Now, I was completely uninformed at that time. They're like, "We don't know why." And nobody thought to ask why. Let's go ask why. So we went up to one of our customers and we asked them, is there something wrong with our meat? She explains that I'm Muslim and I follow our rules and I have to keep halal. Your meat's not certified halal. I can't buy it from you.

I'm like, well, how can I learn about this? I want to serve you better. She introduced me to our Imam. Like in Judaism would be our Rabbi. My team and I went to meet with the Imam and we had a little chat, and they educated us a little. We broke out a Quran and read it to understand it. Then he said, if you want to have a broader business model serving Muslims—he didn't say it quite like this—there's a hierarchy, and I'm low on the totem pole. You got to meet our Amir. So I followed up with a meeting on Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia. That's where they burnt down two blocks during the MOVE bombing. It's pretty rough there.

I took my team there and the guy who drove, he was afraid to get out of the car. He wasn't used to Philly like I am. I had to drag him out of the car. We sat down with maybe a half a dozen Imams and the Amir and we ended up working out a citywide halal program. It was a very interesting thing. That's the difference between what I do and a big chain. No large corporate CEO would get into the weeds.

You know what? It's very similar to when Bill announced one day he's buying this land and he's going to have a farm and put a winery there. Someone said to me, does he really know anything about that? Will it be successful? I go, you don't know this guy. This guy will dig into the details. He will know everything about it. He will push the limits. If he fails at first, he'll just keep on coming back. That's him. It doesn't matter what the business says.

Addressing Food Deserts with the White House

Hey, Jeff, one of the things that you really do... I talk about entrepreneurial risk all the time. All the Acmes of the world and A&Ps were leaving and you're building new stores in cities. You were acknowledged at one of Barack Obama's State of the Union addresses. You actually sat with Michelle Obama and the reason was because you were in the inner city and they were so impressed with what you did. Talk about that experience. That's incredible. To be recognized by the President, by the First Lady... shows so much more what you do than just sell food.

It was one of the most amazing compliments someone could receive. It was a pretty interesting experience, especially its recognition for a thing I was dedicated to beyond belief. People don't really know the story. It started—I don't know if you remember—but there was a debate in Philadelphia between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. This was in the primary, the 2008 election. A couple of days early, Barack Obama was in Philadelphia. Our business is unionized. So he went to the unions and he said, I want to see some things that are important for me to see in Philadelphia while I'm here. And I want to see the ones that the unions like. The unions said, "There's only one guy. You got to see this guy's stores."

I get a call and I'm out of town. They're like, I know it's short notice, but a guy running for president, Barack Obama, he wants to see your stores. Were you familiar with Barack Obama's name at that point? Because he was not that well known. Well, he wasn't that well known, but I knew a debate was coming up between him and Hillary. My union said, can you get here? I'm like, I can't get there. It's physically impossible. Too short a notice. But be my guest. We have a trusting relationship. Give him a tour of the store, explain what we do. It was a food desert store, the early iteration of it.

So he went in and he's shocked because if you go to Chicago, where he's from, there is nothing like this. And if you go really all through the country, there is no solution that has worked. He's like, I don't understand how this guy makes it work, and no one else can make it work. I would like to meet this guy. I have this debate coming up, and I'd like an advisor on food issues. Could he advise me?

I'm like, I don't know if I could be helpful, but if you want to talk, that's fine. So his people said, you know what Barack Obama was concerned about? Bread was very expensive then because wheat was very expensive. If you're a student of history, high wheat prices have also toppled governments because it's a fundamental item of people's diets around the world. He was worried about that because he's an intellectual and he reads history. He was worried, is there a U.S. problem that I need to be briefed on?

I did brief him. I told him that unlike other civilizations, this is supply and demand, capitalist society. You would be amazed how quickly this system fixes problems like that. I think if you let it alone, you'll see within six months, it all falls into line, because the cycle time of growing is quick. You have major companies with a lot of capital, and when the price gets high, they'll invest more capital. This problem will be fixed. Like before you're president. He goes, so you don't think I need to be informed in any other way? I go, I don't think this is going to be like history. I think you're okay. And of course, it never came up in the debate. He becomes the president. As soon as he's president, a mutual political person that we both trust, Dwight Evans, calls him up and says, the president wants to meet with you and talk about food deserts.

Just so listeners know, that's a representative of the Philly reps. He originally was a Pennsylvania representative, but he was chairman of Appropriations, so he was very popular. Of course, later he became a Congressman. So Dwight calls me up, Representative Evans, and he says the president wants to meet with you and talk about food deserts. I'm like, why? He said, because he's fascinated by the fact that you make this work and others don't. He just wants to understand if there's a broader policy he should be thinking about.

We take the train down to D.C. and we meet with like 50 representatives of his new administration, because they're not sure which part of the government would be involved in doing this if they're going to do something. It was a really intense thing where they're grilling me and asking questions. asking my opinion about if we wanted to do a national food desert policy, what would it look like? What would you suggest? Dwight Evans said, have you thought about leadership? Because leadership's important. I think we should start out with who's the leader. The president's representative said, well, Barack Obama loves what he saw in Philadelphia, and he's thinking he should be the leader.

I chimed in and I said, I'm not sure that's the right way to go. Modestly? Or because it sounded like an awesome task? Yeah, it would probably be better for me if I went that way. But I'm like, the Republicans hate you, right? That means they're going to hate whatever you do. You're setting this up for a fight. Let's make it easy on all of us. Make it your wife's legacy. She had just planted the garden and it fits in. It's about health outcomes of children. I think this would be a great legacy to have because it's one of the country's biggest problems.

His representatives say, so you want me to go back to the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, and say, Jeff Brown, the grocer, thinks you're not right for the job, he wants to pick someone else? I'm like, yeah, essentially, yeah. They go, all right, what else? We dug into what I learned from doing this work. Detailed stuff about policy, new market tax credits and how they could be more potent, and agriculture, what changes they could make. They were impressed. They were on me for six months every day, calling me about the idea you have. "There's a problem with it." We spent that six months going through all the various policy problems, which really was quite an education in federal government policy. If I can't go left, can I go right? Or how could I circumvent it.

If I could tell you an interesting example, the Agriculture Department lends money or gives money to farmers. They also have the food stamp program, or now called SNAP. It's quite a large function of the government. You can borrow money from them. The way that they do it is they have field offices in agricultural areas. The farmer goes, explains they need two tractors and it's 125,000, and this is how he's going to pay them back. They're used to dealing with all farmers. We felt that agriculture should be involved, but urban pockets don't fit into that. There's no even offices. So they're like, we don't know how we could do it through agriculture because it's not how it's structured. Some of the things just were not permitted.

We crafted what became the Let's Move campaign for Michelle Obama, which was her legacy. She was focused on childhood obesity, but it fit into what I was trying to do. Her thinking was school lunches, childhood nutrition, nutrition education. But really this fit in, because if you can't get access to fresh food, you can't do any of the things.

When it came time to sell it to the Republicans, they remembered what I said. So they hold me to task. I got a call and a nonprofit leader that said, the president charged us with being your support to go to the Republicans. So they hired a lobbying firm. They were good Republicans. They're like, we want you to go meet with the Republicans and we want you to sell them on this policy and smooth the way for them to be agreeable to it. Which I did. I met with the head of the Republican Agriculture Committee. This is really interesting. I laid out how we're going to use the free enterprise system to solve social problems without subsidizing people and without taking away their incentive to work. He's literally jumping up and down in his chair. What, did you drug the president? There's no way he's going to be for a policy like this. This is a Republican policy. I'm like, I'm not going by that. I'm going by this is the only way this problem gets solved. He goes, we agree with you. Tell us how we could help. And you didn't hear one fight in the media about this. It sailed through and we got the whole policy improved.

Workforce Development Reform

Being a Democrat yourself, and we'll talk about your politics, it's kind of classic, right? Obama wanted to throw money at the problem which has to come from taxpayer dollars. You came up with a solution that was helping not only the people without government money, but making them better people and improving the community. Which is why Governor Wolf, who you, thank you very much, introduced me to, put you on the Workforce Development Board for the state of Pennsylvania. Talk about that, because that was a lot of time and you spent a lot with that.

So Governor Wolf, who's a very educated guy—I think he has a PhD from MIT, which probably should exclude him from public service. He's just too educated. And a lovely human being. Just really good hearted. He went to Dwight Evans and said, show me what I should see in Philly. He goes, you got to meet Jeff. We meet. If you asked me to assess with my knowledge of politics whether this guy has a chance to become a governor, I would say there's no way. There's no way that a PhD in some kind of esoteric thing is going to win over the hearts and minds of Pennsylvania. I met this guy and we just hit it off right away. This guy really wanted to understand the solutions I came up with and how they work, the intricacies, and how am I able to do all the things I do.

When he became governor, he was very fascinated by my workforce work. A whole separate line of work than the food desert thing is: how do you get people that have never worked before? Often people with criminal records, abusive families with substance abuse. How do you get someone who's just traumatized and been through so much hardship to be a productive worker that's going to end up with a good income and a family sustaining situation? What's the path? Because government just doesn't have this right. Wolf wanted to do it and he asked me to take over the workforce board. It's the craziest system that was invented over time, with compromise of Democrats and Republicans that patched together a system that's almost impossible to do anything good.

What happens is the federal government, through different programs with different rules, gives money to the state workforce board, hundreds of millions of dollars a year. That board allocates the money to local workforce boards that have a separate board. Somehow that has to be combined with other social programs so you can have a one-stop center that an impoverished person could go to and organize a plan for them to turn their lives around. But everything has different rules. You really need everything to help someone, but no one qualifies for everything. If I had to explain the complexity of this system, it's a waste of money the way it's currently designed. These things, some of them were created decades ago, like 80, 90, 100 years ago, that have rules from that time that have never changed because the Democrats and Republicans can't agree on how to change it.

So I thought, let me take a whack at it. Interestingly enough, each of these workforce boards has a business plan. In our case when I took over, it was a 450-page business plan on how they're going to use the federal dollars to accomplish this goal. The first thing I noticed is that there's sort of an unwritten rule—actually, it's not unwritten, it's written—that your job with the government's money is to get people a good job. But that ends up bad. I'll tell you why it ends up bad. Because let's say a good job would be $20 an hour. But a person who's never worked before, it's pretty hard to get them to a $20 an hour job. Let's face it. So what the government does with that money is they get people that don't really need the help to hit their numbers because they have goals in their business plan.

One of the things I did was, can we break out of this system? Can we have two pots of money? Can one of the pots help people that are in very bad circumstances? Can we throw out the minimum wage—so contrary to any politician running for office—and get people that no one gives a chance and get them to give a chance? That's what I focused on and built a team to try to make progress in that area.

Hiring the Formerly Incarcerated

Jeff, talk about... you and I spent a lot of time talking about this because this kind of scared the bejesus out of me when you were telling me about how it works for you. Is your formerly incarcerated program. Because that's massive, right? You have a hundred... We have about 3,500 employees. And I want to say we have 800 formerly incarcerated folks. It all started about 20 years ago. I'm opening a new store in West Philly. One of the things that I learned to do is have a town hall meeting, which I don't think you know any CEOs that do town hall meetings with their customers. But if you want to serve someone that you don't fully understand, how would you learn about them? There's not books on this, really.

So the town hall meeting in Philadelphia probably had 800 citizens and leaders from that neighborhood. A very, very well informed lady from the neighborhood said, "I don't know if you're aware of this, want to educate you on something, and then we're going to have an ask of you. An incredibly large percentage of the people that live here have been incarcerated. If you didn't know, when you're incarcerated, you pretty much can't get a job. Now I'm going to challenge your business model. How are you going to be a sustained success with people who can't work? You should fix that problem."

After the meeting, I went to my team. I mean, the lady couldn't be more right. We're here together. We've agreed to be here together. This is a problem our customers have. Someone needs to show that this is possible and it'll have long term benefits for the community and for our own business. Like one day if we're not in a poor neighborhood, I'm the smartest entrepreneur ever and I would have helped a whole bunch of people doing it. My people went nuts. They're like, "You've lost your mind. I mean, this is a high crime area and you're going to have the criminals actually working for us. You're insane. The insurance company won't let you do it."

I said, look, we're going to do this. I heard what you had to say. We're going to hire our first six people. You all can decide which six you want to place your bet on. Be as smart as you can about it. They had all kinds of rules, which we later found out weren't necessary. We hired six, five of which are managers for me today. Wow. What we learned, and the more time I spend with our formerly incarcerated employees, the more I realize they look a lot more like Bill and I than what you think. They're entrepreneurs that didn't have a dad. Didn't have a dad to steer them to use their different personality, their different drive in a more productive way. They could stay home and get welfare, but they chose to do the business that they could do and ended up in jail. But that drive and that creativity, they're entrepreneurs with the wrong product.

We quickly learned that and realized their potential and ran with it. Ultimately someone who is very wealthy asked me, of all the things you do, what would be the most important in society? I'm like, this thing's a home run. He goes, I will fund you to start a nonprofit and I will fund you to do it for society and in this region. That's where Uplift came from, which my wife's the Chairwoman today, but I was originally the chairperson. We broaden. We train CDL licensed truck drivers and HVAC mechanics and food service workers. The tighter the workforce is, more companies are willing to give it a chance. We're doing it 20 years in a nonprofit measuring results. We have a 2% recidivism rate. Wow. Meaning 98% of the people we train never go back to jail again or a life of crime. They're just successful. So this is where society just has it completely wrong.

Wine Tasting: Lafite Rothschild

I think this is a perfect time to drink after that beautiful presentation. Jeff's favorite wine, Lafitte Rothschild. This is an awesome wine. Toasty. What an accomplishment. Jeff, thank you. So proud of you for that call. We didn't even talk anything about business yet. But now this is special. The price point's a little different than Saddle Hill. Well, when Bill's paying, the price doesn't seem to be an object for me. This is unbelievable. Good. This is a great favorite. Jeff, how much is this in your like... No, we don't sell that. Not even in Di Bruno Bros.

Community Engagement and Voting

Jeff, just on a personal note, I want to talk about a few things that I've known you to do. The history lesson of Philadelphia with a store at Third in Oregon, going way back, which is down in South Philly, not far from the stadium complexes. I have seen your store out by in Lehigh, where Connie Mack Stadium, where the Phillies used to play is. But one of the things I was really proud to say, you were my friend for a guy named Rodney McLeod. He used to play for the Eagles. Rodney and I did a radio show together a few years back. Rodney was really into the community and helping and won Man of the Year for the NFL and did a lot of really genuine good stuff and had a Change Our Future Foundation.

On Election Day of 2020, he organized all the Eagles to take a bus around the town. We stopped at all your ShopRites. That was our stops along the way to try to encourage people to get out the vote. I could see how entrenched you were in the community and how much the people really look to you. The ShopRites is almost a center for them and a gathering spot. It was really an incredible, incredible compliment. I was very, very proud of you.

Economic Challenges: Tariffs and SNAP

Thank you. Thank you. And getting back to... I really do, I'm jazzed up about my work. It's so genuine. And I just want you to know that I see it. With not looking for any attention. I mean you turned down appointment from the President basically to make his wife look good. Just didn't need any help looking good. But on where we are government wise and your business, we have tariffs going on right now and I imagine that has big impact on your costs and everything. So you want to talk a little bit about how that impacts you and maybe you see potentially the solutions and where we could go with it.

So there's two Trump administration strategies which are not good for what I do. And tariffs especially. You know, one of the businesses we own is Di Bruno Bros. with a lot of imported... We want to get into that, that sort of new, more recent venture for you. So obviously eventually tariffs are going to raise the price of goods. If I had to pick one reason that Trump probably won, is because the inflation that was experienced during the Biden administration really hurt the everyday American. So it's odd that he has a strategy that's probably going to hurt him a little more.

From COVID to now, there has been unprecedented inflation in food for various reasons. The system still just hasn't recovered. It's not all COVID related, but it's bird flu. There's a lot of things that occurred that have kept some things very expensive. So this is going to add to that problem. Now the food business, there are people that know how this works. A lot of the people in the food business have gone way long bringing in product pre-tariff. So you haven't seen them in prices to a big degree yet. You've seen it in coffee, chocolate, some seafood items. Meat's expensive, not really related to tariffs, related to a shortage of cows. Unlike wheat or chickens that grow quickly, cows take a couple of years to grow. When you misproject the cow herd, it's usually a two year recovery time.

Tariffs are concerning mainly because it's hurting our customers and we're the face to the customer and they're upset because they're having trouble paying their bills. But the more damaging thing is SNAP. If your life's not together and you don't make a living, chances are you apply for what used to be called food stamps, which is now SNAP, to help you feed your family. That program really has been incredibly successful in many different ways. One is—and it's not spoke about a lot—but the rural communities grow the food and so SNAP enhances the farmer's business and they know it. Then there's a multiplier effect because it goes from the farmer to the distributor, some cases to processors and manufacturers. When you take the economic impact, the end impact on the economy is many times what we spent in SNAP.

The current program is slated for a 30% cut. The way most of the cut's gonna occur is they don't wanna be accused of taking food out of babies' mouths. So they had to come up with a way to make it more palatable. They've changed the definition of a child. So younger, older children are not a reason not to work. It used to be you could not work and take care of your kids until they're 18. That's been brought to a much younger age. They're saying as soon as they legally go to school that you need to work. You're talking about a population, most of which have never worked. They might not have graduated high school, they may have a criminal record, they're not really that employable. Now the government's saying we're going to let your kids starve to death if you don't find a job. Which is really a tough call on that population. In our inner city business, a lot of the stores could be 25% of the revenue is SNAP volume. If you go to a store like Save A Lot, could be 50% of the revenue. The likely outcome of this over time is the exact opposite of what I've done. You're likely to see a contraction in stores, contraction or consolidation in farming, a contraction in distributors. Like I said, it's a multiplier effect.

Family Dynamics in the Business

Hey, Jeff. Our families are close. You have an amazing wife. She works by your side. She runs parts of the business that you'd rather not even play around with, and she does a terrific job. You also have four great sons. You now have a couple grandchildren. Talk about all the challenges that come with a family business with one of the kids in the business and your wife and pillow talk and all that kind of good stuff. In the backdrop of I waited for my dad to hear what happened in the store since I was a young boy, at our house was the same way. We talked groceries in business every single dinner. Everyone was debating and arguing and involved since young ages.

Sandy originally was in the consumer goods business. She ran like half the country sales force for Almay cosmetic brand. Before that, Unilever. So she's kind of a grocer in her own right. We were meant for each other, and we have supported each other's goals. We have common goals to raise the kids, to build the business. In a lot of ways, our goals superseded our own comfort. Sandy goes to all the stores, inner city stores, violent places. She's right with me hugging the customers and employees. We're signed up for this together. I don't think I would have been able to do it without Sandy because most wives would be, "Why aren't you home at nights? Why aren't you home on the weekends?" But in this case, we were out together doing it.

Even in the early days, we used to leave some of the kids in our controller's office. Our office used to be in the upstairs of one of the stores. They would rock the cribs while Sandy and I were working on the sales floor. So they grew up in the business. Which caused three of them to go like, "You're insane. We're not doing this."

Josh is your CFO and he's teaching you some things, isn't he? He's a really brilliant guy, Josh. Ivy League guy, very good technical skills, coming from a different perspective than me. Worked in private equity for his two jobs out of college. He's worked his way up to our CFO and he's a part of our four person executive team: Sandy, myself, Josh and the guy who's the president of our company, who's not a family member. We have some pretty rigorous debates. Josh taking a pretty conservative typical finance role, saying, "Where's the return? Where's the payback? Look at the risk." And Sandy, like, "Look at the impact on the customers." And the president who came from an ops background, "How will I implement that? How could I make that work?" And it's pretty intense. Especially he's such an analytical guy and you're like a typical entrepreneur. We use intuition, we use gut feel. And they can't get the gut feel on the spreadsheet and that's what kind of freaks them out.

What's interesting though, just my approach in general, even how I manage, I see my job is to help people do better, not to order them what to do. Most people as leaders don't do as good as they could because they're doing their subordinates' work, because the subordinate can't do their work. To me the most opening strategy is get them to do their work, teach them to do their work, or replace them. I'm a servant leader. I really do try to help everyone do their job better, to achieve their goals better. I take an initial approach to see if I can't bridge all these different ideas and come up with some modification of what I want to do to make it work all the way around.

Running for Mayor of Philadelphia

A couple years ago, Jeff, you woke up one day, it's probably three years by now and said, I'm stepping down from the business. My family's going to run it. I'm going to run for mayor of Philadelphia. Yeah. So I never had any interest in politics. It was a tough eight years prior to that point where I thought a lot of the policies that the then-mayor were pursuing were harmful to the people I serve. I thought that business as usual in the political world, we were going to end up with someone else that was not going to help Philadelphia solve its problems. Working so closely with people, I really had a vision that our problem in Philadelphia is that we allowed the number of people that live in poverty to grow out of control. Too many. Every year they cost more and more to help. You have to raise taxes, and you keep on raising taxes, and it chases away our revenue, our businesses, and our wealthy citizens. The only fix to that is to help people work. That was my experience, and I have a good track record of doing that.

So I decided I wanted to do it. First I talked to Sandy, and her first thing is, "You lost your mind. You're not there with me." And I said, "All right, so I won't do it then if you're not behind it." She goes, "Well, I'm not going to hold you back if you want to do it. All right, you have one shot. Go do it." So we promoted a guy to be president, Paul. Sandy took sort of all the work I had at Wakefern. My son Josh took over some stuff. So I basically divided my work in three, handed it out to everyone, and took off and ran. I think, very good for developing them. Risky, but very good for developing them. But then I don't win, and I'm back. I didn't want to take anything away from them or stop their progress. But we set up this executive committee. My approach is, what have you not been able to get done in the years I was gone? Each of you give me a list, and I'll just work on your list of things that you're having a hard time with and see if I can help you get some stuff done. I had about 100 items over the two years that couldn't get done. I put them down on a spreadsheet like I do, and I started taking a shot at it. Three years later, I think I got 99 out of the hundred done.

Strategic Growth and Acquisitions

Getting that list done, I'm like, all right, what am I uniquely good at that I could be helpful to our family's progress? It's not about me anymore. I don't need any newspaper articles or any attention. I've had more than enough attention in my life, especially with the political campaign. What can I do uniquely to help our family business that probably won't get done if I don't do it? I ended up responsible for M&A, real estate, and strategic partnerships. Things that take a lot more time to do that the operators are bogged down in operation and would tend not to give those things enough time. I said, to help you, I'm going to work independently. I'll do the initial due diligence on my own. I'll negotiate everything on my own. I'll hand you a fully fleshed out LOI executed and then I'll turn it over to Josh to get the agreement of sale and to do all the legal. Di Bruno Bros. was the first deal. Josh asked to be involved early as I guess to show what he could do but also learn.

Di Bruno is really well known in this region. Just tell who Di Bruno's is. Wait a minute. He has two businesses. The ShopRite side, the Fresh Grocer side is kind of in the middle. Then you got upscale. Super upscale. Right? Yeah, some of my ShopRites serve the poorest people in the country, and some of my Di Bruno serve the wealthiest people in the country. There is a common thread between that, that both the poorest and the wealthiest need someone to pay closer attention to their needs because they're different, they're not homogeneous. What you find in an average American grocery store, it's the same everywhere. I thought that this sort of niche work where the shoppers need much closer attention and much more creativity would fit into what we do. Of course, it's been harder than we thought because we have an incredible team designed to do what they do. And this is a completely different business, but we're working our way through it.

Wine Tasting: Dominus Estate

With that, I think it's wind down time. Is today Wednesday? Wine down Wednesday. I like that. So this is one of my favorites. I've owned this wine for both of 2008, and I'm pretty sure I bought it in about 2010 when it was first released. Dominus. It's a Napa wine with a very Bordeaux style. And we love Napa wines, especially Bordeaux style. The winemaker, Christian Moueix. Yeah, it's very good. That's silky. And you could see the stylistic similarity to your wine. You see what he likes, and then he was able to capture that.

The Realities of Political Campaigns

Hey, Jeff. Before we get off completely the political, Bill and I actually, our friendship really bonded when I made a foolish run in the mid-90s for mayor of Cherry Hill. Not the same thing as mayor of Philadelphia. Bill was very, very supportive. I was extremely naive. Even in what is a relatively small town compared to what you took on, you took on a monster task. Beside... I want to test you first. Please spell Eagles for us. No, I'm not giving you that test. But I'm not knocking the current mayor. I like the current mayor, and we got along in the campaign trail. If you lined up our thinking and policies, we're not that dissimilar. She's a fabulous lady, and she's really a great improvement over her predecessor. We don't even need the name. But it was somebody who didn't want to be mayor of Philadelphia anymore.

But talk about the process for a second. Because people like you generally don't throw themselves into that. You're a successful businessman, you've got your family, but you're the kind of person who should be in it. So talk about the process and how we can get better people in government. Because I'm really forgetting which side of the aisle you're on. I'm really bothered by the fact that our political system is broken. Well, it's a brutal system. I think one of my critiques of what we could do differently is your opponent can lie about you and there's no accountability to that. In the private world, if someone were to do a video saying you did something you didn't do, you'd sue them and win. In the political world, that's not how it works. In my case, I had that happen. A smart campaign, the first thing you do is you do oppo research on yourself to see if there's things in the closet that are going to be showstoppers. Sandy and I, we've been working like we didn't have time to do anything wrong. So I had extremely clean oppo research. The guy who did the research produced like a 75-page book on every decision you ever made. He goes, "Despite how clean this is, it's not going to matter. They're going to make it all up and there's nothing you could do about it."

And these are the things they're going to lie and say about you that aren't true. But it's hard to defend because it's a complicated story and everything costs money to advertise. You're not going to choose to defend yourself because you're not going to be able to spend the money to defend yourself or it gets you totally distracted from doing the job. That did happen. And by the way, it happened to us, if you recall, in just running for mayor of Cherry Hill. They created a scandal about me because when I was in college at Rutgers, I still voted out of my parents' house in Cherry Hill, which is totally legitimate. But they made it sound like I committed voter fraud. That's just running for mayor of Cherry Hill. So running a big time mayor position, I can only imagine what you had to deal with. It was incredible. The people who are running for office, some of them will go to lengths that really expose a character flaw that's so substantial, like they shouldn't be involved in anything. But that field attracts those kind of people. Those kind of people win because it works. Doing nasty stuff.

The good part, though, is you get to have a debate and bring up ideas. You get to meet people you never would have a chance to meet in Philadelphia. As much as I'm a community person, I met people in communities and immigrants and different populations that I thought were incredibly fascinating. And the second thought is if I'm not mayor, I'd like to serve them and have a grocery store to serve them. Which one of the acquisitions we recently did, I did do that.

Future Business Strategy

Well, Jeff, being a close friend, I'm not letting you run for office ever again. Sandy told me no more, no way. But let's talk about what's next, because you're still a relatively young guy and you got a lot of energy. Your grandkids are your passion, but you don't play golf, so you are all about business. What's next, Jeff? Yeah, so I think it starts out with my four sons. We're looking at other family businesses and how things could go awry and different choices the parents make. Sandy and I were very purposeful. We would have meetings with our children to explain our estate planning, explain our business holdings, go over how everything does. So they're very well informed. They have given us a lot of good food for thought. They're like, "You have all your life's work tied up." Really, we're in two businesses. We have grocery stores and we own the real estate in a lot of the grocery stores. There's no diversification. I don't know anyone that thinks that that's a prudent thing. So we have started to change. I am spending more time to look at deals I might want to be involved in. I could leverage my skills, private equity type deals. We have focused more on the real estate. That's a way to diversify.

The other thing is we've built enough critical mass of grocery stores in Philadelphia, where we're really very dominant. ShopRite by far is the most dominant. And I have most of the ShopRites. We have a tremendous advantage because our overhead per store is probably the least among all grocers in Philadelphia. So I could buy out a one, two, three store guy and just on the overhead savings, make a success. And the scale of our operation also provide services to the stores and the communities you can't do as a smaller operation. So we're in a consolidating business that's very hard. Our advantage is real and I think we're going to continue growing.

Conclusion

That's amazing. We're proud of what you've done in Philadelphia. You make it super special. I've been in your stores. It's just the coolest thing how you're walking around and you're hugging the customers and you're talking to the customers, like a big old school entrepreneur. And the other part is business and life, and you combine it all so well. How you've raised four great kids and somehow they all got great work ethic. What you said about your wife might be the biggest compliment I've ever heard anybody give their wife. We were made for each other and she's your partner, your teammate, and it's just wonderful. Yeah, I know how genuine you are. Wish you could have been our mayor, but glad you're around. Still servicing our region in our area. Proud you're here, buddy. Thank you. You guys are the best. I appreciate your sentiment. And we appreciate everybody for listening on behalf of Bill Green, the proprietor of Saddle Hill, my partner here in the show, and Jeff Brown, our wonderful guest and just an incredible person and entrepreneur himself and a great part of our community. I'm Gerald Colton saying thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time on Uncorked. Cheers.