I Tried Erewhon's $15,000-a-Year Reserve Membership for a Month

Erewhon is a Los Angeles health-focused grocery store that opened in 1969 and later shifted under new ownership toward an ultra-premium food destination. The chain gained major attention in 2022 when Hailey Bieber’s $21 strawberry smoothie became a viral phenomenon, leading to rapid expansion across multiple LA neighborhoods and more planned locations. Erewhon is known for an elaborate Tonic Bar with celebrity collaborations, an upscale hot bar, and a strong presence of influencers. Its product lineup includes high-priced specialty items and a wellness approach centered on mushroom supplements. Despite the high costs, many customers treat Erewhon as an everyday grocer, and the store later announced elite membership tiers.

"Best known as a wonderland of intriguing specialty products with prices that feel like performance art - $24 coconut yogurt, $75 matcha, $18 bottles of camel milk - the health-focused grocery store opened in LA in 1969. But in 2011, it fell under new ownership that rebranded it as an ultra-premium food destination rather than a hippie-food depot, and in 2022, all hell broke loose when Hailey Bieber's $21 strawberry smoothie debuted and became an instant phenomenon, bringing national, even global attention to the once-lowkey chain."

"New Erewhon locations opened one after another in Silver Lake, Culver City, Beverly Hills, Pasadena, West Hollywood, and Studio City, with several more planned for the future. Its reputation is now both aspirational and polarizing; it's known for its elaborate Tonic Bar beverages (including a never-ending series of celeb collabs), upscale hot bar, high concentration of influencers, and adherence to a particular mushroom-supplement vision of West Coast wellness."

"Despite becoming more and more omnipresent, the store seems to show no signs of waning interest from the public. I'm consistently fascinated by how many people in LA can afford to make the high-price-point chain their everyday grocer. A friend once casually told me she spends $2,500 at Erewhon every month. "On what?!" I asked, incredulous. "Oh, you know - food, my supplements," she replied nonchalantly, as though spending $30,000 annually on groceries as a childless adult was perfectly normal."

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