Johnson City, TN : ANOTHER store coming to N.E. TN/Tri-Cities

Johnson City, TN : ANOTHER store coming to N.E. TN/Tri-Cities

By Jeff Keeling
Press Business Editor
Johnson City Press Chronicle

Natural foods outlet to open State of Franklin location in June.

Johnson City will become home to the Tri-Cities’ first natural foods supermarket later this year when Fletcher, N.C.-based Earth Fare opens for business in a space near East Tennessee State University.
“We’ve been looking at Johnson City for a couple years, actually, and it was just difficult to find a site,” Earth Fare CEO Michael Cianciarulo said Monday. He said the company will put a couple of million dollars into retrofitting the 24,000-square-foot space – currently home to a White’s Fresh Foods – at 1735 W. State of Franklin before opening in June, and eventually hire about 100 employees.
Cianciarulo said Tri-Citians can expect a store that caters to, among others, the vegetarian, health food and epicurean markets, that sources much of its product locally and that is a good employer and corporate citizen.
“We think it’s going to be something that brings a lot of good products and options to the people of the Tri-Cities,” he said.
The origins of Earth Fare lie in “Dinner for the Earth,” a small natural food store that opened in Asheville in 1975, changed its name to Earth Fare in 1993, upsized in 1994 and opened its second store, in Charleston, S.C., in 1997. Today, Earth Fare has 13 stores in four states, with three more under way, but still espouses the values that spawned the first store, at least according to the “Mission and Values” section of the company’s Web site:
“We support the empowerment, development and wellness of our customers and staff by operating a successful business focused on education, fair trade, organic and local foods, and other healthy choices for the environment and ourselves.”
Earth Fare’s pending arrival means the 24,000-square-foot anchor of the University Plaza strip center won’t sit waiting on a tenant. That was good news Monday to Larry England, who owns a Cartridge World store occupying one of the center’s smaller spaces.
“I was in a different business before this in a strip center and one of our main anchors went dark about a year after we had moved in – it really made a huge impact on our traffic,” England said.
England is excited about the arrival of Earth Fare and expects it to have positive effects on the 20-year-old center. “I think it’ll help draw additional tenants,” he said.
Cianciarulo said Johnson City probably would have a store already were it not for the difficulty in locating the chosen site, which he called a good size (Earth Fare’s prototype is 27,000 square feet) and good location for Johnson City and for access to shoppers from other parts of the Tri-Cities.
“We have Johnson City people that travel a long way to buy groceries,” Cianciarulo said. “We bring almost 30,000 items in one building that may be available throughout the market in scattered smaller stores, but can’t be found in one place.”
Earth Fares have full-service meat departments, large produce sections, gourmet cheese that is cut and wrapped on-site after weekly deliveries from New York City and Europe, and extensive beer and wine selections, though the Johnson City store won’t have a wine section. The new store also will feature a deli/cafe, a large selection of nutritional supplements and, Cianciarulo said, selections from local farms and small businesses.
“We’re going to go out and open the door to anybody that we can support in the local arena,” Cianciarulo said. “It could be somebody with a marinade sauce that’s locally produced or a small farmer. We’re buying broccoli from Boone, N.C., and shipping it to all our stores, we purchased millions of dollars worth of local products last year, and we go out of our way, no matter how small a guy is, to try and support them.”
Despite becoming the country’s third-largest natural foods retailer (sales exceeded $100 million last year and its plans call for opening five or six stores a year), Cianciarulo said the company is sticking to an approach that benefits employees and seems to avoid running the “little guy” – such as Johnson City’s two existing health food stores – out of business.
“We bring more exposure to what they stand for, and they seem to thrive after we come in,” Cianciarulo said of independent competitors.
He said Earth Fare offers good benefits and gives full-time jobs to about 65 percent of employees, compared to about 30 percent in the supermarket industry as a whole.