The checkout lines moved like any other Saturday, but as of this weekend every King Kullen on Long Island has a new owner. Giunta's Meat Farms, the family grocery company based in Oakdale, completed its purchase of King Kullen on Saturday, the two companies said in a joint announcement. The deal covers all 24 King Kullen supermarkets and the four Wild by Nature natural foods markets, every one of them in Nassau or Suffolk.

What changes at the register: nothing, for now

For shoppers, the honest answer is that Monday's grocery run will look exactly like last week's. The companies say no stores are closing, no layoffs are planned, existing union contracts will be honored, and the pharmacy counters and other in-store services keep operating as they have. The people behind the deli counter on Tuesday are the same people who were there on Friday.

The visible change comes later. Over the coming months, the new owners will decide which locations keep the King Kullen name and which are converted to the Giunta's Meat Farms banner. So the sign out front at your local store may eventually change, even as what is behind it mostly does not.

A deal 96 years in the making

The sale was announced at the end of July and was expected to close in September. It slipped a few weeks, and the deal closed on October 3. With it ends one of the longest family runs in American retail: the Cullen family had owned and operated King Kullen since Michael J. Cullen opened the first store in a vacant garage on Jamaica Avenue in Queens in August 1930.

That first store was not just the first King Kullen. The Smithsonian Institution recognizes it as America's first supermarket, full stop. Cullen's idea, radical at the time, was to rent cheap space away from the high-rent shopping streets, stack goods high, price them low, and let customers walk the aisles and serve themselves. Nearly a century later that describes essentially every grocery store in the country. It started here, and the company it built grew into Long Island's largest family-owned grocery chain, headquartered today in Hauppauge.

Who is taking over

If King Kullen had to be sold, it is hard to imagine a buyer closer to home. Giunta's is another Long Island family grocery company, now in its third generation, with roots in a Queens butcher business that entered the supermarket trade in 1952. It runs ten Meat Farms stores across the Island, known for their butcher counters and produce, and its headquarters sit in Oakdale, about 20 minutes down the road from King Kullen's.

The two companies framed the combination as a way for Long Island's family grocers to survive in a market that has been squeezing them from both ends. National discount chains keep adding Island locations, and the big regional players keep expanding. By combining purchasing power, the companies say, they can push supplier prices down and pass some of that along at the shelf, while keeping decisions about Long Island stores in Long Island hands.

The sale that almost happened instead

Longtime customers will remember that this is not the first time King Kullen agreed to be sold. Wegmans, the Rochester-based chain, reached a deal to buy the company in 2019. That sale dragged on for more than two years and was finally called off in 2021, with the pandemic's upheaval cited as the reason. Had it gone through, America's first supermarket would have become a satellite of an upstate giant.

The deal that actually closed keeps the company on the Island, under a family that has been selling groceries to Long Islanders for more than 70 years. There is a version of this story where a 96-year-old institution gets absorbed, renamed and quietly dismantled. This is not that version, at least not on the terms announced: the stores stay, the jobs stay, and the question of the name on the sign gets answered store by store.

What to watch

Three things will tell the story of whether this works. The first is the banner decisions, which will show how much of the King Kullen identity the new owners think is worth keeping. The second is prices, since lower shelf prices were the stated point of combining. And the third is what happens inside Wild by Nature, the small natural foods chain King Kullen built, which now belongs to a company best known for its meat cases.

For now, the thing worth knowing is simple. The supermarket was invented on Long Island, the company that invented it is still owned on Long Island, and the store you shopped at last week will be open this week. In 2026, for a 96-year-old grocery chain, that counts as a happy ending.