It’s six o’clock on a Tuesday morning, and Sam Mogannam is running up 22nd Street with a friend. The hill is steep, but that doesn’t seem to bother him. At the moment, Mogannam, the 43-year-old owner of Bi-Rite Market—and one of the most imitated grocers in the nation—is more concerned with dry-farmed tomatoes.
“Dude, you’ve got to try them. We only have them for a few more weeks. They’re the perfect tomato,” he insists as the two men continue their run.
Mogannam has been running hills and doing pushups with the PacWest Athletics BootCamp twice a week for more than seven years, “with a few blue periods,” he admits. He has vowed to get in shape this fall, when he’ll be on the road promoting the store’s first cookbook, Eat Good Food, and getting ready to open a second location of his market early next year.
Once boot camp is dismissed, Mogannam heads to work, where he showers and swaps his tee for a Bi-Rite shirt—which resembles something a mechanic might have worn at a gas station in the 1950s, with a beacon logo sewn above the heart. He takes a swift tour of the aisles—snatching up a stray sugar packet, straightening the cookies next to the cash registers, adjusting a salumi label in the deli case. “That’s going,” he says, pointing to the olive bar. “Sales have stagnated for a couple of years now. We’re not sure why, but we’re putting in prepacked olives and giving the space to something else.”
Out on the loading dock, Mogannam rips open the first shipment of pink pearl apples from Devoto Gardens in Sebastopol. “Fucking gorgeous,” he says, admiring the opalescent skins and, as he bites into one, the hotpink flesh.
“This is my ritual after a weekend,” when business peaks, he says. “To see how the store has been maintained. It looks fantastic.”
“Hey Sammy, dinners start next week?” Simon Richard, Bi-Rite’s longtime produce buyer, asks. Richard is unpacking more dry-farmed tomatoes from Tomatero Farm.
“Yup, Monday. Did you sign up?” Mogannam runs his hands over the tomatoes. Every fall, he cooks harvest dinners for his staff and serves them at 18 Reasons, the food-based community center he cofounded in 2008.
Mogannam crosses against the light on 18th Street. He likes to support neighborhood businesses, so he heads to Fayes Video & Espresso Bar for his daily soy café au lait.
Anyone hoping to do well in the grocery business would be advised to take notice of Mogannam’s actions during his ten-minute morning tour of his store. The secrets are there in his hands-on grooming of the deli case, in his ditching the low-performing olive bar for more profitable stock and tasting the produce before it goes on the shelf, and in the dinner he cooks for his staff. That relentless editing and a razor-sharp focus on hospitality account for much of Bi-Rite’s extraordinary success—making it one of the most-watched markets in the country.
The store draws the kind of buzz usually reserved for the latest pop-up restaurant just announcing its location on Twitter. But Bi-Rite’s success is no fad. In the 14 years since Mogannam took over, sales have grown by $1 million every year. The market, along with Bi-Rite Creamery & Bakeshop, which he opened in 2006 with his wife, Anne Walker, and their partners, Kris Hoogerhyde and Calvin Tsay, are local institutions and guide book–touted destinations. Bi-Rite’s enduring popularity may surprise some observers, considering the market’s tiny size and its reputation for being an overcrowded, overpriced magnet for affluent bohemians. And then there’s the fact that there’s no parking lot, so customers sometimes return to their cars to find an envelope addressed to the SFMTA on the windshield.
Bi-Rite may sell groceries but Mogannam runs it like an anti-supermarket. Rather than grow his business, he constantly refines it: limiting his selections and turning down countless offers to expand his brand. In many of his decisions, he comes off as a reluctant entrepreneur.
When Mogannam was 15 years old, the market was owned by his father and uncle. The Mission district hadn’t yet been discovered by a generation of tattooed 25-year-olds happy to stand in line for a $3 latte. Just up the street, Mission Dolores Park was popular with unemployed men who spent their days drinking fortified wine, some of which they bought at Bi-Rite. Though he was not yet old enough to drink, in 1983 Mogannam asked his father if he could remerchandise the wine department. He got rid of the Night Train Express, MD 20/20, and Ripple, and on the advice of the store’s wine reps brought in their strongest sellers—Sebastiani, Robert Mondavi, and Beaulieu Vineyard. The drunks found someplace else to shop, and Bi-Rite’s wine sales soared.
It would prove to be the quintessential Mogannam decision: eliminate a popular item that makes you uneasy and take a risk on a product that you can feel better about. Everyone benefits—customers, vendors, and the market itself, what Mogannam has come to call the Bi-Rite triangle. “It was the beginning of understanding how decision making can really impact a business,” he recalls.
More recently, Mogannam made a similar choice when sales in his fish department started to stagnate. Mogannam attributed the slump to confusion about sustainable seafood. “Conscientious eaters avoid what they’re not sure of,” he says. “At least, that’s what we guessed, since our guest count wasn’t going down. So we decided to take some stands.”
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