Young Kim talks about...

You don’t need to be the biggest brand to make an impact. You just need the courage to believe your product deserves a place on the shelf, and the persistence to prove it.

I started back in 2010 as a part-time stocker in Jubilee’s Financial District location. This was my first and only job. I was in a position where I had to help out the family with some of the bills and stuff. So I took a little break from school. I was just a 20-year-old asking around for jobs, and someone said, “Oh, this place called Jubilee might be hiring.”

I interviewed and told them it was going to be a one- to three-month temporary job. But I don’t know, something was very fascinating about working at a grocery store, especially in New York City. You have all these people from different backgrounds, and it was so interesting what they purchased. I just ended up staying and here I am.

I spoke with my boss, and he said, “It’s not just a job. If you make it a career, it becomes a career. It’ll be long hours, but I’ll give you the opportunity to work in different departments.” And that’s what I did. I was working six days, 12-hour shifts. In the morning, I’d work in the deli. In the afternoon, I’d stock groceries. I’d get a little time in the kitchen, get a little time in meat.

Five years in, I became assistant manager. I did my own studying and took some online courses. I just kept at it. In 2017, they named me a partner. And then in 2023, when we opened the Greenpoint location, they named me CEO.

We are what the community wants us to be. A good portion of our items come from customers themselves. Even if one customer requests it, we’ll give it a shot. We’ll put it on the shelf and then we’ll see how it does.

The other portion will be smaller brands we’re trying to help out because it’s hard to get into a grocery store at that stage. The product might be fantastic, but if you don’t have exposure, which is very tough for CPG products, it’s very difficult to get into groceries.

And it’s not like you can just sign up with a distributor. It costs a lot of money, time, effort. We usually welcome smaller brands. At that stage, it’s the founders doing the demos. Our customers also get very excited to meet the actual owners of the brand or product. I think that’s what makes it special. We try to be a community store versus just pushing a brand onto people.

As a hobby, I make content on social media. When it comes to the food space, a lot of restaurants tend to get featured more than CPG brands. For me, it was just an idea. What if people want to know more about the product? Because if it’s sitting on the shelf, that’s all you see. You see the product. You see whatever literature the company put on it. I wanted to make it a little bit more interesting for the customer.

I don’t follow the traditional protocol or traditional methods other retailers might consider. There’s the basics: how much does it cost, what’s the minimum case quantity, expiration date. But when I get presented with a new item, especially for new brands, I want to know the person behind the brand. I think it helps predict how well it’s going to do on our shelves.

We have a general idea of what kind of product we want to carry in terms of ingredients and how it's processed. But besides that, we welcome smaller brands. For the bigger brands, we have a grocery manager and a buyer. But the smaller brands, I usually communicate with directly and try to build a relationship.

Because of the blueprint of our retail spaces, we won’t be able to showcase a product all the time. So I want to know what you’re doing as a small brand to promote your product.

A lot of new brands come to us and it’s a great product, but sometimes it just blends in with all the other products we have, which is unfortunate. But it does.

Are you willing to do demos at the store? Are you willing to do a pop-up? We've had tons of pop-ups, and we sold out multiple times. This way customers get to try the product.

I don’t know how this is going to sound, but I’ve had brands in the past that are already placed in Whole Foods. And they use that to convince us to carry their product, which I don’t like. They’ll come in saying, “You should carry it because Whole Foods carries it.”

I think we are slightly different from Whole Foods. We want to be Jubilee, and we don’t want to know what other stores your product is in. That’s one to avoid.

Our protocol is we try two orders, meaning if the product ends up sitting there and eventually goes out of date, we’ll place another order and try one more time. We give it some time because a lot of leases are one or two years. We try that item after every year or after every 14 months. But if it’s a product we’re passionate about, we’ll just keep going.

Even though it doesn’t make financial sense, we keep it on the shelf and keep the price very low because we believe in the brand. We just want to help out. It may seem stubborn, but luckily everything worked out because if we had removed it, we would have missed out. Eventually it starts doing well.

Someone asked us if we get paid for features or for sales with small brands. Absolutely not. There’s no cost involved. We put the promo on our dime so it doesn’t hurt the brand. A lot of the sales we do with smaller brands are almost at cost.

I think of it as a small investment because a price reduction means a customer will try, and hopefully they try again at regular price. With smaller brands, I tend not to ask for anything. It feels wrong. It wouldn’t really be helping.

Three months or so. Usually that’s when it reaches all our customers. Some shop once a week, some twice a week, some once a month. So it usually takes about three months to determine if it’ll do well.

There was this company called Arabian Nights Hummus. The maker, Khalid, does everything small batch. Great personality and incredible work ethic. We featured him on social media and we sold out a couple of times within a week or two. The day before Thanksgiving he was scheduled to sample at the store, and we had to cut it early because we sold out.

For Sourmilk and Buddy’s Coffee, they had their own following and we mutually benefited.

The first one was the smash burgers we sell in the cafe. Rob Martinez was the first to cover it and the story went viral. Then the $5 rotisserie chicken, Ron Martinez and Johnny Novo came to feature us on that. Then we reduced pricing back in August, and the New York Times covered us. I got to meet Pete Wells, which was a great honor.

The phrases came from comments: Rob Martinez coined “cheaper than a subway swipe.” “Five buck cluck” came from a viewer.

The Smash Burgers were special to me because I grew up in Jersey. I used to go to White Manna. I remember having a couple bucks and buying a burger. I wanted to recreate that here. During construction, my team and I had to eat out every day. It was expensive. We wanted to make it a third space for everybody, where you could be a high school student or middle school student, or someone working across the street.

I was very grateful because as a new business, we were struggling. We’re on the outskirts of Greenpoint, and the area was still in development. I was fortunate to have exposure from these projects. I met awesome content creators. I want to pay it forward. A lot of what we do doesn’t make sense business-wise, but expecting something in return isn’t helping. So I try to give back as much as we received.

We're trying to rebrand some of our culinary program for the new year. And hopefully, we should be able to do more collabs with small CPG products where we get to incorporate their products into our culinary program.

We’re going to start a smoothie program in the cafe, where we'll use Sourmilk for every container of a yogurt smoothie. Our current sushi program uses the Silky Soy Sauce from HEYDOH in our omakase set. And this will be another way for customers to try the product.

The trend I’ve picked up recently is more authentic food. Sometimes brands alter products to make them more “Americanized.” But people now want more authentic versions because they’re traveling. If someone visits Japan, they want what they had there.

I’m seeing better ingredients, but obviously with that, prices go up. I want to tell CPG brands, don’t be scared to charge what you’re supposed to charge if the quality backs it up. Like HEYDOH Soy Sauce didn’t move at first because it was more expensive. We sold it at wholesale cost for a while. But when people tried it, they tasted the difference and it did extremely well.

The smaller brands I work with, we’re usually in their first or second big retailer. Versus a smaller retailer, we just have a lot of variety. So I think it’s just patience. I tell them, it’ll be OK. It will move at some point. We just have to push it a little more. And it eventually does. But that waiting period, they haven’t experienced it before.

I think social media, fortunately or unfortunately, is a great tool. It’s a necessity at this point. If I had to give advice, document your journey from start to finish. That’s what gets people excited.

Reach out. I’m always here to help, answer questions and try your product. But you know your product better than anyone else. Follow your gut, your passion, and push through. If your product is truly great, I’m sure it’ll be a home run.

Young Kim went from stocking shelves to running Jubilee Marketplace, one of NYC’s most influential independent markets, learning the grocery business from the inside out. Today, he’s known for championing small brands and opening retail doors for early-stage founders.