California grocer selects Longmont

LONGMONT – A California-based grocery and bulk foods store plans to fill the space of the former Albertsons grocery store in Longmont by this summer.

SmartCo Foods, a new grocery brand of Smart & Final Inc., plans to purchase the 58,000-square-foot former Albertsons building at 1750 Main St. in Longmont and open its store there in July, along with four others in the Denver metro area.

SmartCo Foods will cater to both household and business customers, offering a nonmembership mix of a regular grocery store paired with a bulk foods warehouse store.

Randall Oliver, spokesman for Smart & Final, said the concept blends the company’s traditional bulk-food services to business customers and its new expanding small-quantity and organic fresh food items to household customers.  

The store’s business clients range anywhere from food caterers and small restaurants to companies buying food supplies for their offices.

To serve the individual and household customer, Smart & Final will leverage the grocery and organic food sales expertise it gained through the acquisition of 35 Henry’s Farmers Markets and Sun Harvest Markets stores in Southern California and Texas in 2007.  

Those stores have a former local connection, in that they used to be owned by Boulder-based Wild Oats, which acquired them in 1999. Wild Oats was then purchased by Austin-based Whole Foods in 2007, who later sold the Henry’s Farmers Markets and Sun Harvest Market brands to Smart & Final for $166 million.

In total, Smart & Final operates 282 stores nationwide. The former public company is now privately held by New York-based Apollo Management LP, which acquired it in 2007 for about $814 million.

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