Online grocery startup Weee has inked a massive lease for a cold storage facility in Clifton, New Jersey.
Weee, a California-based company specializing in Asian food, is taking 220,000 square feet at 174 Delawanna Avenue, according to the STRO Companies, which controls the entity that owns the Clifton facility.
The online grocer has been using a 50,000-square-foot Edison site for about a year. The expansion in Clifton was to accommodate the company’s rapid growth, said Jack Schulman, STRO’s director of leasing, acquisitions and capital markets.
“They quickly became a hit with the very diverse demographic in the New York metro area,” Schulman said. “They were specifically looking to create a regional hub to service the tri-state region and found that 174 Delawanna was an ideal property to serve their freezer, refrigeration, and dry warehousing needs.”
The site is 12 miles northwest of the Lincoln Tunnel. Weee did not immediately return a request for comment.
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CBRE represented the property owner. Lee & Associates in Oakland, California, represented the tenant.
The rise of online grocery was accelerated by the pandemic as more shoppers sought alternatives to going into stores.
In September, Amazon, which owns Whole Foods Market, opened an online-only Whole Foods in a Sunset Park, Brooklyn, facility owned by Jamestown Properties.
Internet retailers accounted for about 10 percent of U.S. grocery sales in 2020. The figure is projected to more than double by 2025, according to Supermarket News, citing a study by grocery e-commerce specialist Mercatus and research firm Incisiv projects.