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50,000 sf Eataly or Anthony Bourdain’s
planned 155,000 sf mega project
at Pier 57 in Manhattan.
The key to success here is understanding
the customer base and where those cus-
tomers are coming from. Is it a tour-
ism-based site? Is it transit-oriented? Is it an
amenity in a new urban office high-rise
where primary customers might be the
lunchtime office crowd?
There are other challenges as project devel-
opers and investors look ahead to ride the
wave of the food hall movement. While
there is no doubt that as the popularity of
food hall projects builds, market saturation
will eventually become an issue. But that is
unlikely in the near term. Clearly there are
generally fewer opportunities to develop
such projects within major transit hubs in
the U.S., but there are hundreds of untapped
potential sites such as the nation’s airports,
as well as transit hubs in both primary and
secondary markets that have yet to have
developed such space. Tourism-based sites
across the nation also present significant
opportunities, either stand-alone projects in
those urban areas popular with tourists to
major malls that thrive on tourism-based
retail. In fact, mall operators are increasingly
looking to food hall concepts to add to their
tenant mixes. This is evident with single-op-
erator concepts like Eataly. But we also
anticipate mall operators will enhance their
food, beverage and entertainment tenant
mixes to include some plug-and-play food
hall developers by next year. There remains
plenty of room for growth when it comes to
larger food hall projects in 2017 and beyond.
We expect the big trend going forward will
be the mini food hall as project amenity.
Cushman & Wakefield tracked 20 existing
projects in our survey this year as well as
another couple under construction.
As mentioned earlier in this report, most of
those 15 projects in the works that develop-
ers did not yet want to list as active are
mini food halls planned for ground floors of
new urban office, multifamily or hospitality
projects. This trend is in its infancy and is
likely to emerge as the most significant
driver of this trend going forward. Ultimate-
ly, there is potential for hundreds of these
types of projects across the nation in both
new and existing projects where the densi-
ties required for smaller food halls would be
easily within reach.
The U.S. will close 2016 with
a total of 35 new food hall
projects totaling 771,000 sf
of space.
FOOD HALLS OF AMERICA
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CUSHMAN & WAKEFIELD