Former Englewood Whole Foods will become Save-A-Lot, angering some community leaders. ‘You never hear about a Save-A-Lot in Lincoln Park.’

The former Whole Foods on 63rd Street and Halsted in Englewood, once heralded as the start of a new chapter for a neighborhood that has long struggled with access to high-quality fresh food, will now be a Save-A-Lot.

The store will be operated by Yellow Banana, a grocery company owned by the Cleveland-based investment firm 127 Wall Holdings LLC. Yellow Banana operates 38 Save-A-Lot grocery stores nationally, including a handful in the Chicago area.

Yellow Banana’s lease on the former Whole Foods building began Jan. 1, co-founder Michael Nance told the Tribune. Nance said the company hopes to open the store in February but has not committed to a date. On Thursday, a Save-A-Lot sign was visible on the building.

Community leaders in Englewood, including Ald. Stephanie Coleman, whose 16th Ward includes the grocery store, expressed frustration that the former Whole Foods would be replaced by a grocery brand they said was known by many residents for poor quality food.

“My community does not want a Save-A-Lot grocery store,” Coleman said.

“To go from such a full-scale grocery, a high, high market if you will, to the lowest, that sends a very mixed message to our community, quite frankly,” she said. “We deserve quality, affordable fresh produce just as any other community in the city of Chicago.”

Asiaha Butler, CEO of the Resident Association of Greater Englewood, or R.A.G.E., said residents who will be most affected by a grocery operator choice had been excluded from the decision-making process. She said some residents have explicitly said they did not want a Save-A-Lot to replace Whole Foods.

“It’s hard to accept this when people have a history of knowing what Save-A-Lot has been in Black communities,” Butler said. “You never hear about a Save-A-Lot in Lincoln Park, or downtown.”

Developer Leon Walker of DL3 Realty said Thursday that Whole Foods had selected Yellow Banana as the sublessee of the Englewood store. Whole Foods did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Yellow Banana executives have previously acknowledged Save-A-Lot’s poor reputation in Chicago. At a community meeting last summer, Nance said the company had “tarnished” its name in the city. On Thursday, he reiterated the company’s commitment to improving the quality of its Save-A-Lot stores, such as by sourcing some products from wholesalers other than Save-A-Lot.

“If you go into our stores now, you can see organic spinach and similar products that we’re really excited about,” he said.

A representative from Save-A-Lot could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday.

Nance has previously said that 60% of the products at Yellow Banana-owned stores will be sourced from Save-A-Lot; on Thursday, he declined to say whether that percentage would also apply to the Englewood store.

The Englewood store will also have a bakery, a hot food bar and a coffee bar, Nance said. He said the company was committed to bringing in local operators for those amenities.

Last summer, Yellow Banana was awarded $13.5 million in city tax increment money to reopen an Auburn Gresham Save-A-Lot shuttered in 2020 and to renovate five other Save-A-Lots it already operates on the city’s South and West sides. The City Council cleared the funding in November.

Nance said Thursday the transaction for the funding had not yet closed but that renovations would begin “reasonably soon” after it does. Yellow Banana had initially said the Auburn Gresham store could reopen by the end of 2022; Nance said the company now hopes to reopen that store toward the end of the first quarter or beginning of the second quarter of 2023.

The sale agreement between the city and developer DL3 Realty requires a full-service grocery store to operate in the Englewood Square development, where Whole Foods was the anchor tenant, until November 2027. The agreement requires a new grocery store to be up and running within 18 months of Whole Foods’ closure.

In 2020, Save-A-Lot announced plans to sell off its corporate-owned retail stores in order to focus on wholesaling; as of last summer, the company owned and operated 18 out of more than 850 stores nationwide.

Whole Foods’ 2016 opening in Englewood, supported by $10.7 million in city funding, was heralded as the start of a new chapter for a neighborhood that had long struggled with disinvestment and access to healthy food. Whole Foods announced it would close last spring at the same time it announced the closure of a store near DePaul University — and the same week it opened a nearly 66,000-square-foot store in the Near North neighborhood.

The Englewood Whole Foods closed in November. Shoppers who cruised the aisles during the store’s shut-down sale mourned its departure.

“It seems like every time we get something good in our neighborhood, something happens to take it away,” one grocery shopper told the Tribune at the time.

Soon after the announcement of the store’s closure, Mayor Lori Lightfoot blamed prices at Whole Foods for its demise.

“Most Chicagoans are hard-pressed to pay, for example, $15 a pound for a piece of steak,” she said at the time. “We’ve got to make sure that we’re making the investments that make sense for those neighborhoods.”

Lightfoot’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Though some residents agreed Whole Foods wasn’t accessible to all Englewood residents, many expressed hope that a new grocery store would be a middle-of-the-road operator. Last spring, Walker told the Tribune a new grocery store should be neither a gourmet option such as Whole Foods nor a deep discounter.

“We’re looking for an operator in the middle,” he told the Tribune at the time. On Thursday, he said he was “happy to see” what he described as a “blended concept” emerge in Englewood: one that could offer value but that he said would keep the look and feel of the former Whole Foods store.

Some Englewood residents are working on developing a community benefit agreement to bring to Yellow Banana, said Cecile DeMello, executive director of the nonprofit Teamwork Englewood. A community benefit agreement lays out benefits a company will provide to a community in exchange for its support.

“There’s an opportunity to do very intentional work around local suppliers, local hiring and the inventory diversity,” DeMello said.

Nance said Thursday the company “agreed to talk with the community” about what a community benefit agreement might look like.