The House of Wu

"Everyone doubted the concept," says Lewis Wu, smiling.

The concept is Foodmart International, which opened on December 8, and the doubters are now seeing such large crowds at the Jersey City, N.J. store that the 1,500 shopping carts are rationed to the lines of weekend shoppers by security personnel.

Thirty-year-old Wu is a Burma native who has been in this country 25 years and spent almost 16 of them involved in five Asian supermarkets in New York City.

Before the area was gentrified into what is now known as the Gold Coast, the site of Foodmart International, near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel connecting New Jersey and Manhattan, was a tangle of marshes and the skeletal remains of factories.

Four years ago, Wu recalls, what was to be a 138,000-square-foot Pace warehouse store was built there. It never opened because Kmart, which owned Pace, sold it to Wal-Mart's Sam's Club, which didn't want to open that particular store because there is a BJ's Wholesale Club four blocks away. So Sam's sold the building to Bradlees, which went bankrupt.

Wu had often passed the building on his way to the malls in the area, and at the time had been looking unsuccessfully for stores for the heavy Hispanic market in the Jersey City area.

"I loved it," he says of the store. "I was sitting outside thinking, 'Nice location?but what do you do with a building this size? What is it good for? If I do a club store, we'll be killing each other on price. This place has to be different, has to be special. The only way to make it special is to put in the three major ethnic groups: Oriental, Hispanic and Anglo.'"

Now, with Foodmart International a reality, Wu says, "It's impossible to copy this concept. This isn't like a Waldbaum's or A&P or ShopRite concept. Bringing in the Asian side, that's the toughest, because there is no large Asian distributor. You have to bring the products in yourself. Most of the products are shipped directly from the Orient. For someone to copy this concept is basically impossible."

Wu originally had managers for the Hispanic side but is now handling that himself because, as he puts it, "Business is business no matter if you're handling Asian products or if it's Hispanic or American products. Once you know the items, it's the same business."

Knowing your market helps, too, and within an eight-mile radius of the store are huge Asian and Hispanic populations, as well as traditional Anglo shoppers, including a yuppie enclave two blocks away.

Foodmart International announces its scope immediately with a 12,000-square-foot produce section that boasts an impressive 1,500 to 2,000 items?50 percent traditional