The Balducci family patriarch, Louis, an immigrant from
Corato,
Italy, began his family's career in the New York City food trade by selling fruits and vegetables from a pushcart in
Greenpoint, Brooklyn between 1914 and 1925. The family returned to Italy in 1925, returned to the United States in 1939 and in 1946 Louis and his wife Maria opened a fruit stand at the corner of
Christopher Street and
Greenwich Avenue in
Greenwich Village. In 1972, they moved across
Sixth Avenue into a storefront at Sixth and West 9th St.) and Grace (and her husband, Joe Doria). (A third child, Charles, was a physician; his son, Louis B., was active in managing the store.) News accounts describe disputes between the three siblings and their father Louis. In 1985 Grace and Joe left the company to start Grace's Marketplace on the
Upper East Side. Louis B. left in the late 1980s and became partner at Agata & Valentina, another specialty grocer on Upper East Side. With their daughters uninterested in taking over the store, Andy and Nina sold in 1999 for $26.5 million to Sutton Place Gourmet, a Maryland-based company. The flagship store on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village closed in January 2003 but a branch store, on West 66th Street, remained open. In November 2003, the company was purchased by an investment group led by
Bear Stearns Merchant Banking. (Separate from the history of the store, but part of the family's history in food, Andy and Nina's daughter Ria's husband Kevin Murphy left Balducci's and started Baldor Specialty Foods, an
East-Coast produce distributor. The name Baldor is said to be a combination of the names Balducci and Doria. Following its opening, Local 1500 of the
United Food and Commercial Workers Union began protesting outside the store against the non-unionized status of employees. In April 2009 the company closed its two New York City locations, the new flagship at Eighth Avenue and 14th Street and the West 66th Street store. There are currently eight full-service retail stores in
Connecticut,
Maryland,
Virginia, and New York (
Scarsdale). In 2012, Balducci's returned to New York with Balducci's Gourmet on the Go Café in Hearst Tower, which serves prepared meals and soups as well as a gourmet salad and coffee bar. There are four Balducci's Express locations: three in
JFK Airport in New York and one at the Leesburg Corner Premium Outlets in Virginia. but it closed in 2024. In April 2009 Balducci's was sold to
Kings Food Markets, a portfolio company of
Angelo, Gordon and Co. In 2016, Kings and Balducci's were sold to
GSSG Capital. In 2020, Balducci's filed for bankruptcy, and was sold to
Albertsons. ==References==