Source: LOHAS Weekly Newsletter
Published: Monday, December 01, 1997

Whole Foods Market Inc. (WFMI) by spring 1999 will open a 27,800-sq.-ft. store in Atlanta, the city’s first natural foods supermarket, on an undeveloped site at the corner of Briarcliff and LaVista northeast of downtown. The LaVista location is in an orthodox Jewish neighborhood and directly across the street from a kosher grocery, according to Carl Black, GM of Return to Eden, a vegetarian market about 1 mile from the Whole Foods site. Specialty foods retailer Harris Teeter also has a store with a large natural foods set about a mile from the WFMI site. New retail grocery locations in the Atlanta area are scarce and result in high-profile competition between mainstream markets Kroger and Publix, Black says. WFMI plans a total of three or four stores in the Atlanta area, a largely untapped market for natural foods, according to Don Caffery, president of WFMI’s Southeast division.

Nature’s Heartland, a privately held health-food supermarket chain led by Fresh Fields veteran Leo Kahn, opened a 27,000-sq.- ft. store in Newton, MA, boosting total stores in the chain to two. Plans are to bring Nature’s Heartland’s Boston-area presence to four stores in 1998. Nature’s Heartland was considering entering the Ohio marketplace with a suburban Columbus store but decided to concentrate on building a core presence in the Boston area first, according to Brad Eisold, director of purchasing for grocery, frozen dairy and bulk foods.

Wild Oats Markets (OATS) plans to open a Columbus, OH-area store in 1998, according to the company. It will be that Midwestern city’s first natural foods supermarket. OATS opened a 27,000-sq.-ft. store in the Buffalo Grove suburb of Chicago in November, the first of 10 to 12 planned stores in the Chicago area.

Health Exchange, a new retail venture started by Michael Madnick, former owner of Florida’s Wholly Harvest, which was sold to Wild Oats, opened its first outlet in a strip shopping center in Boca Raton, FL, in November. The 1,000-sq.-ft. store offers vitamins, herbs, supplements and homeopathic remedies. Madnick declined to project first-year sales, but says the chain’s growth will be in south FL for the foreseeable future. Sources say the new venture is planning four south FL stores. Madnick says he sees new opportunities in the increasingly crowded vitamin retailing market.

U.S. Health and Nutrition, a Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-area on-line (www.usnutri-tion.com) vitamin retailer has opened its first retail outlet in a strip center in suburban Burnsville. In addition to a full line of vitamins and supplements for adults and children, the store offers pet foods and diet supplements for animals.

Great Earth Vitamins, a Hicksville, NY-based, 140-store national chain, plans to open 75 additional stores by 2000 and has projected its total store count at between 400 and 500 by 2003. In northern CA, Great Earth will boost its store count from 10 to 25 by 2001, the company says. It also plans to open 24 new stores in the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore corridor by 2002.