Target Lines Up Chobani Café for Upcoming Manhattan Store

The discount retailer said Wednesday that its 45,000-square-foot store, set to open in Tribeca near the World Trade Center in October, will house a Chobani café that will offer Mediterranean-themed sandwiches, salads, and Greek yogurt dishes. It will be the second such café for Chobani and the first one nestled in another company’s store. Chobani will operate the 1,100-square-foot space. The yogurt maker opened a stand-alone store in Manhattan’s SoHo district four years ago.

Courtesy of Chobani

Target CEO Brian Cornell has made pushing urban stores a priority to win business from city dwellers who don’t want to hike out to one of its mostly suburban stores and from office workers looking for a lunch on the go or emergency groceries. Target will also open two smaller format stores in Brooklyn and Queens this year, as well as three in the greater New York area. (It already operates several big box stores in various parts of the city.)

“Through Target’s flexible-format stores, we’re able to build customized stores in urban neighborhoods—like the Tribeca store—to make it easier for guests to shop,” Anne Stanchfield, vice president of flexible formats and localization, wrote in a blog post.

Target already operates 19 such stores and plans to double that number by the end of 2017. The retailer opened its first small format store in 2012 under the name City Target and later opened even smaller stores which were formerly called Target Express. Last year it dropped those monikers and now simply calls them Target stores.

The average Target store (there are 1,800 locations nationwide) is about 135,000 square feet in size and located in suburbs. With urban stores, Target is looking to capitalize on the migration of the affluent back to city centers in recent years. The average median annual household income in the Lower Manhattan store’s zip code is $216,037, three times the Manhattan average.