A planned collaboration between Hawthorne Valley Farm Store and Nice & Weird LLC will be bringing fresh organic groceries, bulk foods, and grocery staples to Hudson’s waterfront by late 2026, transforming the former Kaz warehouse at 14 Montgomery Street into 16,000 square feet of retail and community space.
“It’s going to be a full-scale grocery shopping experience,” says Hawthorne Valley’s Director of Retail Jeremy Laurange, “with the center aisles, frozen foods, dairy—everything you’d expect, plus robust bulk foods and produce sections. The bulk foods section will be similar to what Honest Weight offers up in Albany, and the produce selection will be large and fresh, highlighting local farms. We recently adopted a mission to go net-positive, to focus on reducing our plastic waste and generally do a lot more for the planet and the soil, so with this new building, we want to expand the aspects that exemplify that.”
Founded in 1981, Hawthorne Valley is a 900-acre educational campus and certified Biodynamic farm in Ghent. The flagship onsite farm store and bakery, offering products from over 200 producers, opened its doors in 2006. Laurange says they’re looking forward to providing Hudson with pricing and selection that will keep local customers coming back. “Hudson doesn’t need another expensive boutique store, what some people call a ‘food museum,’” he says. “Currently we help do the buying for Rolling Grocer 19, which is a terrific small shop with a three-tiered pricing system that’s targeted to keeping things very affordable. Now, we’re going to be scaling up the volume of our purchasing, obviously, and hopefully be able to offer them even better pricing to continue their good work. So we’re excited about that.”
Ben Fain, principle of N&W LLC and owner of the neighboring Kitty’s Market and Restaurant, Grapefruit Wine Shop, and recently opened Caboose Hudson event space, says getting to partner with Hawthorne Valley is “a dream,” adding, “It’s perfect timing, because they were looking to expand and I was looking for a way to bring something like this to Hudson. If you look at their track record, they’re the pioneers, and I feel very lucky to get to be part of what they’re doing.”
Fain’s vision for the grocery store includes a 400,000-kilowatt rooftop solar array and “a proper green building—good thermal envelope, lots of insulation, good heat pumps,” he says. “The technology is there—solar panels have come a long way—and people just need to get comfortable with using it. That’s my core mission, to decarbonize the building stock of New York State. There are a lot of people working on that, and I want to help and be a catalyst, so most of the buildings I’m working on are carbon-neutral.”
The revitalization of the waterfront, he says, “has just sort of grown into things I didn’t quite expect. From the start, I loved the people I met here and the work being done, and looked for a way to be part of it, and here was this sort of underutilized area right near the Amtrak. And I’m not the only one doing work down here—Basilica has been doing amazing things for around 12 years. Kite’s Nest is putting their headquarters down here, and Wm. Farmer & Sons is doing an unbelievable job bringing people down to this area. It had been so neglected, and now it’s just a lot of brilliant groups pooling their passion. And New York State, Governor Kathy Hochul’s office, and NYSERDA in particular, has been wonderful. I followed my instincts in opening Kitty’s and Grapefruit, and now the Caboose is doing better than I’d even thought. I look forward to adding the first net-zero grocery store in the state.”
Laurange says the goal is to bring in fresh, affordable food at prices that rival those at the chain supermarkets on the outskirts of Hudson, alongside a courtyard that will host community events. “We are excited to partner with Ben and N & W LLC on this project to bring a grocery store to Hudson,” he says. “Ben is passionate about reducing our environmental impact and bringing beauty into living spaces, both of which are values that we hold dear at Hawthorne Valley. We are equally enthusiastic about the potential this project has for us to support our community partners in Hudson more fully. The end of 2026 seems like it’s far away, but putting together something of this magnitude, the time will fly—and as the details fill in, we’ll have a lot more exciting news to share in the coming months.”
