This is Iowa's Favorite Grocery Store, Website Says

You can get it all in grocery stores, from fresh food to canned goods and, in many, a cafe or coffee shop, pharmacy or florist. "They are the places where you can find everything you might need to live: from fruits and vegetables to dried goods, meats, fish, laundry detergents, paper towels, candles, shampoo and so much more," the website The Daily Meal says. "They are hubs that house both essential and non-essential products that help make daily life that much easier and allow customers to buy everything at once rather than forcing people to make multiple trips."

To find out where people shop, The Daily Meal conducted informal polls; checked out online "best-of" lists; read reviews on Google, Yelp, Foursquare and Facebook; and analyzed local polls, social media posts and check-ins. The website said its goal was to weigh "concerns and praise about price, quality of products, and customer service, as well as store cleanliness" and make the ultimate determination about the favorite shopping spots in each state.

While they excluded small specialty and gourmet markets to focus on stores that meet everyday shopping needs, they found that "independently owned and locally founded stores often won out over the big chains like Kroger or Whole Foods."

Iowa's clear winner was Hy-Vee, the Chariton-based, employee-owned regional supermarket chain that has approximately 240 stores located throughout the Midwest. There are 138 stores in Iowa alone, The Daily Meal noted.

In a national survey of America's favorite grocery store last spring by Market Force, Hy-Vee came in seventh — which isn't bad for a non-national business. The winners were East Coast staple Wegmans, based in New York, and Florida-based Publix, which tied. Trader Joe's came in third, followed by H-E-B, Aldi and Harris-Teeter.

And now that Hy-Vee is earning props as Iowa's top grocery shop stop, you might see employees grinning even more than their longtime slogan boasts: "Where there's a helpful smile in every aisle.”

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