Founder of Stew Leonard's grocery chain dies at 93
Stew Leonard Sr., the founder of Stew Leonard's, a regional supermarket chain with its most recent branch in Paramus, died Wednesday after a short illness. He was 93.
A graduate of the University of Connecticut's School of Agriculture, Leonard began his career by working at his family's dairy in Norwalk. In 1969, he built a state-of-the-art dairy store in town that Ripley's Believe It or Not deemed the world's largest, at 17,000 square feet.
The store delivered milk in trucks fronted by plastic cows that “mooed” for the neighborhood children. This whimsical, family-friendly item may not surprise Stew Leonard's many customers; mechanized singing cows are a signature feature of its stores.
The Norwalk location was the first of the seven Stew Leonard's supermarkets that today can be found in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. The 80,000-square-foot outpost at Paramus Park mall opened in 2019.
Stew Leonard's, currently a $600 million family-owned business that employs more than 2,500 people, was once dubbed the “Disneyland of dairy stores” by The New York Times. It is famous for its animatronics. Besides its singing cows, at the Paramus store you can find a singing parrot with a top hat above the mayonnaise aisle and a man in a hot air balloon playing an accordion hanging from the ceiling above the deli. In a few of its stores, you also will find a petting zoo.
Stew Leonard's was named one of Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” 10 years in a row. In 1986, Leonard was presented with the Presidential Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence by President Ronald Reagan, and in 2002 he was named “one of the top 50 visionaries” by Supermarket News.
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His top role in the company ended in 1993, however, when he was convicted of having committed tax fraud. He served 44 months in prison.
His son, Stew Leonard, Jr., 68, has been running the business since then, with help from his siblings Tom Leonard, Beth Leonard Hollis and Jill Leonard Tavello. Five of his 13 grandchildren have also joined the business.
Nevertheless, the senior Leonard, an award-winning water-skier, would often show up at the stores to greet customers and say hello to employees. He knew many of the workers by name.
"My dad was a legend in the food industry," Leonard Jr. said. "He always had a positive outlook on things. He was inspirational, not only to his family, but the thousands of people who worked in our company. He treated everybody the same, from the guy who pushed carts to company officers."
He added: "I was lucky to have had 68 great years with him."
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Stew Leonard Sr. dies, founder of Stew Leonard's grocery chain
