Starting Friday, the parking lot of the Uncle Giuseppe's in Smithtown gets a new fixture: the company's own food truck, serving sausage and peppers heroes through the weekend. It is the first stop on a five-weekend tour marking the marketplace chain's 25th anniversary, and over the next month the truck works its way through four of its Long Island stores and one village festival before circling back to where it started.

Five weekends, one truck, one dish at a time

The tour runs Fridays through Sundays from October 2 through November 1, and each stop features one item rather than a full menu. The schedule, from the company's own tour page:

October 2 and 3: Smithtown, 95 Route 111, with sausage and peppers heroes.

October 4: the Town of Oyster Bay Italian Festival in North Massapequa, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., with a broader menu of the truck's favorites.

October 9 to 11: Port Jefferson Station, 1108 Route 112, with zeppole.

October 16 to 18: Melville, 890 Walt Whitman Road, with fried ravioli.

October 23 to 25: North Babylon, 1170 Deer Park Avenue, back to sausage and peppers.

October 30 to November 1: Smithtown again, closing the tour with fried ravioli.

The one-item-per-stop format means the schedule doubles as a map of allegiances. Zeppole loyalists have exactly one window, the second weekend of October in Port Jefferson Station. Fried ravioli gets two chances, Melville in mid-October and Smithtown on the closing weekend. The company says menus can shift with the season and the stop, so the featured item is a promise of emphasis rather than an exclusive.

Twenty-five years from a corner shop in East Meadow

The anniversary the truck is celebrating traces back further than most shoppers realize. Before there was an Uncle Giuseppe's, brothers Carl and Philip DelPrete and their partner Tom Barresi bought East Meadow Farms in 1998, a 7,800-square-foot shop on Hempstead Turnpike. The first marketplace under the Uncle Giuseppe's name followed in 2001, built on the idea that a suburban supermarket could feel like an Italian specialty market, with the mozzarella pulled in the store and the sauces made behind the counter.

Twenty-five years later the company runs thirteen marketplaces across New York and New Jersey, employs about 2,700 people, and says its stores turn out roughly a thousand scratch-made items a day. Long Island has watched the growth up close. The newest store opened in August in Greenvale, filling the shuttered Stop & Shop that had left the hamlet without a supermarket, and a Levittown location is slated for late 2026, with the company's first stores beyond the tri-state area planned after that.

Carl DelPrete, the company's chief executive and co-founder, said the truck is a way to take the food traditions the stores were built on out to where people already are. The timing is deliberate: October is Italian Heritage Month, and the tour is the company's public celebration of it.

Why a supermarket needs a food truck

Uncle Giuseppe's has always sold the experience as much as the groceries, with the hot bars, the in-store kitchens and the smell of the bread program doing work no circular can. A truck is that same argument in mobile form, and parking it at the company's own stores is a bet that the lot itself can be a destination for a weekend lunch. The October 4 detour to the Town of Oyster Bay Italian Festival is the more conventional move, putting the brand in front of a festival crowd in North Massapequa that may know the name but not have a store nearby.

For readers keeping score at home, the truck's debut weekend is also the busiest food weekend of the fall calendar, with Oktoberfests and harvest festivals competing for the same appetite. A sausage and peppers hero eaten off a truck in a Smithtown parking lot is a reasonable entry in that competition.

If you have a favorite among the three featured dishes, the calendar above is the only planning tool you need. If you do not, the closing Smithtown weekend, with fried ravioli on Halloween weekend, settles it for you.