Last updated on August 15th, 2024 at 02:10 pm
Super G Mart is the largest international supermarket in North Carolina, offering spices, produce, grocery and household items from across the globe.
Paul Han, VP of operations, spoke with The Shelby Report of the Southeast about the company during the recent Carolinas Food Industry Council conference in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
The first Super G Mart store opened in 2008 in Greensboro. The Charlotte store opened two years later, and the newest location in Pineville debuted in 2022.
Han said the international grocer divides its aisles by regions – U.S., Latin American, Indian, European, Middle Eastern, Hispanic and Asian. He noted that the Asian aisle is divided further – East Asian and Southeast Asian.
Super G Mart offers a variety of produce, meat, seafood and other items tailored to the needs of the international community. These are products not always found in conventional grocery stores.
“It’s very different,” Han said. “Each aisle you go down, you get the full grasp of main ingredients, ready-to-go meals and all that. I think that’s our biggest differentiation point.”
Han said the company is planning to expand into South Carolina and possibly Georgia and other states.
The Pineville location is the largest store at 108,000 square feet. Han said about 60,000 square feet is grocery space, with the remainder home to a food hall featuring local restaurants.
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The Charlotte and Pineville stores also have a dedicated community space, The Club at Super G, Han said.
“We will hold a host of cooking classes, cultural exchange classes, language immersion, culture immersion events,” he said.
Han’s family purchased the company from its founder. He said he never intended to get into the grocery business, having majored in sports psychology in college.
He is in his 10th year with company full time, having worked there during summers when he was in high school and college, bagging groceries and translating when needed.
After working in South Korea for a while, Han said he was visiting his mother one summer and saw that “I had my blinders on, where I thought grocery was just food.” Now, he sees that food brings people together at the table, where they can share their day and spend time together.
“I’m more interested in the human mind and the human heart,” he said. “How can grocery help people? There are a lot of great programs today, like food as medicine, using food [to live] a more healthy lifestyle.”
Han also noted that Super G Mart stores use universal design in their layout, with wider aisles, lower shelves, larger print on signs, providing “full accessibility to all the surfaces.”
While Super G Mart was founded to deliver hard-to-find ingredients to ethnic communities, it has evolved over the years. Han described the stores today as a “meeting ground for every person to explore different cultures.”
