Current Today is bcdW Magazine's daily newsletter — one story, one city, read through the eyes of the world.

We launch today in test flight. Each edition takes a single real story from one of our cities and asks: what does this mean for someone living somewhere else entirely? What ideas travel? What collaborations become possible?
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Whole Foods has opened a new smaller-format "Daily Shop" in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood — stocked not just with its signature range, but with locally curated products: pesto from Gotham Greens, crème fraîche from Vermont Creamery, bresaola from Brooklyn Cured. National Today

Small-format premium stores are not new. Every major city already has them. Dubai has Carrefour Market. Seoul has GS25 and CU. Top 10 Dubai Medellín has Éxito Express. Tel Aviv has AM:PM. The express format is a solved problem.

What changed is the shelf.

Whole Foods Daily Shop is using New York local brands — not national brands — as the reason to walk in. And that creates something that didn't clearly exist before: a collaboration between a foreign local brand and a New York local brand becomes the entry ticket into one of the world's most visible premium retail networks.

The old playbook: build a brand, find a distributor, pitch a buyer, wait years.

The new playbook: find a New York local brand, collaborate, and walk through the door together.

(Source: Brooklyn Today — March 9, 2026)

Seoul — GS25 and CU together operate over 30,000 stores across Korea, and both have aggressively built private-label product lines. But they've largely kept those products inside their own ecosystem. The Whole Foods Daily Shop model points in a different direction: a small-format store becomes the launch pad for local brands into the global premium market. Korean food startups — fermented sauces, craft makgeolli, premium kimchi brands — now have a concrete template for how to get from a Seongsu pop-up shelf to a Brooklyn retail slot.

Medellín — Éxito Express is Colombia's dominant small-format chain, and it carries Grupo Éxito's own private label. But Medellín's artisan food scene — specialty coffee roasters, cacao producers, craft hot sauce brands — remains largely invisible to global premium retail. Whole Foods has a formal local vendor program. The question for Medellín's food entrepreneurs isn't whether their products are good enough. It's whether anyone has helped them build the packaging, certifications, and story that gets them through that door.

Dubai — Carrefour Market and Waitrose both operate small-format premium stores across Dubai. Top 10 Dubai The rise of private-label products is already a key trend in UAE supermarkets, with most chains introducing their own branded products at competitive price points. Gourmet Pro What Dubai hasn't yet done is use those small-format stores to spotlight emerging local food brands the way Whole Foods Daily Shop does. The UAE has a fast-growing artisan food scene — specialty date producers, local honey brands, craft hot sauce — that is ready for exactly this kind of retail showcase.

Amman — Jordan's small grocery retail is dominated by neighborhood family shops and mid-size chains. There is no premium small-format equivalent. But Amman has a rich local food production tradition — olive oil, za'atar blends, artisan dairy — that travels well and has strong export potential. The Whole Foods Daily Shop model is essentially a proof of concept for what an Amman-based food brand needs to build toward: a local retail anchor that also serves as a credibility signal for international buyers.

Tel Aviv — Israel's AM:PM and Tiv Tam operate as convenience-premium hybrids, but neither systematically curates local artisan brands the way Whole Foods Daily Shop does. Israel's food startup ecosystem is sophisticated — there are dozens of premium local producers in fermented foods, plant-based products, and specialty condiments. The gap isn't product quality. It's the retail format that bridges local producer and global shelf. Whoever builds that format in Tel Aviv first will own a powerful discovery platform for Israeli food brands going global.

San Francisco — SF is Whole Foods' home market in spirit. But the Daily Shop model being tested in Brooklyn is a direct challenge: can premium hyperlocal retail work in a city where retail has been hollowing out for years? The answer will shape whether SF's remaining artisan food producers — specialty roasters, fermented goods, small-batch condiments — find a new domestic channel or have to look to New York first.

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→ Read bcdW Magazine

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We are getting older. All of us. Faster than we planned, longer than we expected, in cities that were never designed for this. Climate is changing everything — heat, water, food, safety. And at the same time, the oldest generation in human history is growing larger, living longer, and asking a question no city has fully answered yet: where do we belong in all of this? Sim Eternal is the project building that story — not as a warning, not as a policy paper, but as a living narrative about the future city told by the people who will live in it the longest. The olds are not the problem. They are the point. And this city is theirs.

→ Visit Sim Eternal City Project

Current runs on one city, one story, every day. But the map is still being drawn.

We are looking for contributors who live and work inside the cities they write about — one story from your city, told the way only a local can tell it. We are also looking for readers who want to add their voice to other cities' stories — benchmarking, similar cases, collaboration ideas, a connection worth making. If a story from Medellín reminds you of something happening in your city, tell us. That response is the whole point.

Right now we are building across the Americas and Asia. But the dream is longer than that — from America to Afro-Eurasia, local to local, city to city, one real connection at a time.

More stories. More cities. More continents.

If you have one, send it.

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