Local Mission Market, a new San Francisco grocer, is trying to reimagine food shopping through the lens of user experience. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED The owners of Local Mission market believe they can bring people closer to what and how they eat. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED While some prepared items come at a premium, the fresh, local produce is relatively affordable. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED Few places insist on making nearly all their packaged foods themselves. The processed foods at Local Mission Market are made on premises — hundreds of products altogether. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED Local Mission Market wants to offer a full range of foods people expect from 21st-century U.S. food purveyors. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED An iPad app organizes items in the store by category and picture. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED Sophia Weiss updates the signage on the retail floor. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED Local Mission Market makes everything from jams, ketchup, and hot sauce to pasta, almond milk, and baby food, on premises. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

SAN FRANCISCO – Shopping at the Apple Store isn't like shopping anywhere else. The same can't be said for supermarkets. Though the specific foods on sale might differ between a Kroger and a Whole Foods, the template is the same: cavernous spaces jammed with thousands of choices, ending with the checkout counter shamble.

Local Mission Market, a new San Francisco store, tosses that entire model in favor of rethinking grocery shopping as a user experience.

As with Apple, that experience starts with product. After all, it wouldn't matter how innovative Apple's stores were if what they were selling sucked. In 2010, Yoran Milgrom and Jake Des Voignes opened Local Mission Eatery, which, as the name suggests, is premised on sourcing its ingredients from close to home. The original animating idea behind Local Mission Market, the pair say, was simple: Let's take our restaurant kitchen, make it bigger, and use it to make groceries, too.

"It's not incredibly difficult to make 10 times as many pickles," says Des Voignes, executive chef for both the restaurant and the market.

But the impetus to open a market wasn't only about getting bigger for the sake of getting bigger. The owners' belief was that if the same care taken in restaurants for bothsourcing and making food could be applied to groceries, they could help change people's relationship to what and how they eat. But the pair felt that realizing such an ambition meant abandoning the standard concept of supermarkets altogether.

"They've always been aggregators and resellers," says Milgrom, who was getting his Ph.D. in medieval Jewish mysticism before going into the food business. "They've never been producers."

This isn't strictly true: Supermarket deli counters everywhere mix up new batches of chicken salad every morning. Whole Foods has its cornucopia of prepared foods. But few such places insist on making nearly all their packaged foods themselves. From jams, ketchup, and cookie dough to pasta, almond milk, and baby food, the processed foods at Local Mission Market are processed on premises – hundreds of products altogether, says general manager David Dranitzke, whose background is in film production. Underlying that dedication to preparing foods in-house is the idea that convenient food doesn't have to mean the lower quality typically found in the aisles of prepackaged products at standard supermarkets. At the same time, Local Mission Market wants to offer a full range of foods people expect from 21st-century U.S. food purveyors.

"We don't want to be a boutique market," Milgrom says. "We want to be a one-stop shop."

Buying a week's worth of groceries for a family on a budget could be tough at Local Mission. Like Apple, many products come with a premium mark-up (that ketchup costs $7 for a small jar). But other items, such as produce, are relatively affordable, especially for carefully selected seasonal fruits and vegetables coming from farms not too many miles away.

While the food itself provides the premise for Local Mission Market, the trio knew that virtue alone would not move product. Instead, they wanted the shopping experience to project the same values they hoped their food embodied: transparency, connection, and intimacy.

"This wasn't going to work if it was going to be a hassle," Dranitzke says.

In the deliberately small 1,600 square-foot space, the retail floor and kitchen are open to one another, and everything is tied together with a custom digital infrastructure. The biggest hold-up in checking out at any grocery store, Milgrom says, is "weight items," that is, anything from produce to meat to cheese to dry goods that have to be weighed and labeled. At the center of the bulk bins (think dried beans, chocolate chips, and flour), an iPad app organizes everything in the store by category and picture. Put the food on the scale, tap through to the photo that matches what you're buying, and print the label. The same integrated system is used behind the butcher, cheese, and fish counters.

The weighing system is tied into the point-of-sale system so that when items are purchased, they're docked from inventory – a fairly standard retail arrangement. Not so standard is the eventual plan to have that system connected not just to what's on the shelves, but to the recipes of everything being made in the kitchen. If fresh pasta is popular, for example, the system will warn if the supply of semolina flour also being sold on the floor is running low. When the raw ingredients being sold up front also power the kitchen in back, logistical smoothness becomes crucial.

The system was also conceived from the beginning to enable online ordering, which the store plans to roll out soon. To keep order fulfillment manageable, online customers will have to become members. A lower tier of membership will allow you to pick up your groceries at the window. The higher tier, meanwhile, will get you your groceries delivered on a tricycle designed and built by the MacArthur genius grant recipient up the street.

In the most obvious nod to the Apple store, Milgrom says the store will soon be offering roaming checkout – instead of going to the counter, cashiers with barcode scanners and credit card readers attached to iPhones and iPad Minis will walk the floor and tally up grocery baskets wherever shoppers are standing.

Though the store feels small, Milgrom says it had 325 customers on Saturday, its first, and could have accommodated many more. But the Local Mission Market concept – the user experience – wouldn't work if the store got too much bigger or crowded. Though the owners say they're strictly focused on making this first store a success, the power of its model lies in its modularity. It's easy to imagine taking a store of the same size with the same systems and migrating it to a different city, where it could plug into that locale's network of farms and foodies. Unlike traditional supermarkets, the point isn't to wow through sheer size. Similar to how Apple stores will never try to get as big as Best Buys, the value of Local Mission Market is in its portability.

Says Milgrom: "Local Mission 2.0 is not going to be 30,000 square feet."