Supercenter retailer Meijer is taking a sharper aim at food shoppers with plans for a new and smaller brick-and-mortar store concept dubbed Meijer Grocery.
Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Meijer said Meijer Grocery stores will sport a “condensed and quick-to-navigate” layout and house a fresh produce department; a fresh meat counter; a full-service deli; a bakery department with in-store cake decorators; a dry grocery department; a pharmacy; a health and beauty care section; baby and pet care areas; a household consumables section; card and party aisles; and a floral department.
Meijer Grocery stores will run 75,000 square feet to 90,000 square feet — compared with about 155,000 square feet for Meijer supercenters — and offer parking wrapped around a single corner entrance, which the retailer said will optimize the number of parking spaces near the door.
Plans call for the first two Meijer Grocery stores to open in southeast Michigan’s Orion Township and Macomb Township in early 2023.
Meijer already has rolled out several neighborhood grocery store locations, most recently the 42,000-square-foot Rivertown Market in Detroit, which opened last October.
Meijer noted that the new format will bring more convenience to customers seeking a simpler shopping experience and easier access to fresh foods for communities in its Midwestern market area.
“Our customers know they can count on us for the freshest foods and best value, which has always been at the core of what we do at Meijer,” Meijer President and CEO Rick Keyes said in a statement. “Meijer Grocery will now provide that same combination of freshness and value in a foods focused format in your local community.”
Meijer already has delved into the neighborhood grocery arena with four locally focused stores in Michigan. The company opened Bridge Street Market, a 37,000-square-foot store on the west side of Grand Rapids, in late August 2018. That was followed by the 41,000-square-foot Woodward Corner Market in January 2020, the 37,000-square-foot Capital City Market in downtown Lansing in October 2020 and the 42,000-square-foot Rivertown Market in Detroit’s East Jefferson Corridor in October 2021.
Designed to blend in with the neighborhood and cater to the needs and tastes of their communities, the smaller-format stores feature a mix of local, fresh and affordable foods as well as a range of prepared food and beverage offerings along with shopper and pedestrian amenities. The Bridge Street Market and Woodward Corner Market stores also anchor mixed-use developments.
Besides its easier-to-shop format, Meijer Grocery also will bring shopping convenience and savings via Meijer’s mPerks customer rewards program, Shop and Scan frictionless checkout, and Meijer Home Delivery and Pickup online grocery service.
“We’re excited to provide our customers with yet another way to shop,” commented Don Sanderson, group vice president of foods at Meijer. “This new concept store will not only provide our customers with everything they need on their weekly shopping trip, but also a quick and easy solution for when they realize they left the key ingredient off their list while cooking dinner.”
The unveiling of the Meijer Grocery concept comes at a time when food-at-home demand remains strong following the explosion in grocery sales during the pandemic. Though partly lifted by inflation, weekly household spending for groceries held at $136 as of the first week of August, compared with $143 in the comparable period in 2021 and $134 in mid-July 2020, according to FMI-The Food Industry Association’s August 2022 U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends report.
Meijer Grocery, too, provides more site selection flexibility to Meijer, enabling the retailer to establish a presence in strong markets and locations that cannot accommodate a full supercenter. The new format also serves up another option to customers not wanting to shop a big store like a supercenter, especially for food-focused trips.