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Downtown Grocery Store List (current + proposed)

Northern Light said:
But Danforth has missed at least one if not two generations of renos; everyone expects that store to go Condo.
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The Danforth Store is also in a bad location. When I need to get groceries coming home from work I would rather go to Valumart at Woodbine because it is directly above a subway station.

Even for the locals, it is not walkable. You either drive there and pay to park or you go to the Metro down the street
 
Here's an observation for you.

Scarborough, a part of Toronto with a good 700,000 people has:

0 Sobeys
0 Longos
0 Farm Boys

North York is also a relative desert:

0 Sobeys
2 Longos
0 Farm Boys
 
Richard White said:
The Danforth Store is also in a bad location. When I need to get groceries coming home from work I would rather go to Valumart at Woodbine because it is directly above a subway station.

Even for the locals, it is not walkable. You either drive there and pay to park or you go to the Metro down the street
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You do not pay to park at Sobeys Danforth, the pay is only for non-Sobeys customers.

The walk from Main Stn is 2-3 minutes tops.

The problems there owe to being under-invested in; but also in a previous renovation cycle they closed the west entrance to the store, which made parking on that side rather useless.

It's also a physically small store; which is fine, if you're going for the Farm Boy/Urban Fresh vibe; but for full-line shops, they have no pharmacy, no supplementary services, very little in the way of large family/bulk offerings etc.
 
Northern Light said:
Here's an observation for you.

Scarborough, a part of Toronto with a good 700,000 people has:

0 Sobeys
0 Longos
0 Farm Boys

North York is also a relative desert:

0 Sobeys
2 Longos
0 Farm Boys
Click to expand...

For years though Highland Farms and Dominion dominated Scarborough. I recall growing up in West Hill shopping at Dominion over at Morningside Mall, at Neilson Road/Ellesmere and at Rylander and Kingston Road or Highland Farms at Bennett and Lawrence.

There were two highland farms in Scarborough and still to this day there are 3 Metros that I know of in Scarborough.
 
Northern Light said:
You do not pay to park at Sobeys Danforth, the pay is only for non-Sobeys customers.

The walk from Main Stn is 2-3 minutes tops.

The problems there owe to being under-invested in; but also in a previous renovation cycle they closed the west entrance to the store, which made parking on that side rather useless.

It's also a physically small store; which is fine, if your going for the Farm Boy/Urban Fresh vibe; but for full-line shops, they have no pharmacy, no supplementary services, very little in the way of large family/bulk offerings etc.
Click to expand...

I was last in there 2 years ago so thank you for the correction.

I found that store to be lacking in selection and a pain in the butt to walk to if you are in a hurry or if the weather was bad.
 
Leaside is the most interesting case to me; Sobeys has spent a bunch on that store; it's also the one where the CEO of Empire shops.

It does decent numbers though, it's rarely out-the-door busy.

The Longos down Laird has a gorgeous building, and fills to capacity (pre-Covid) quite regularly.

The Longos, I think, is safe.

But the Sobeys.......I don't know if Michael Medline (Empire CEO) would actually pull the name plate out of Toronto all together..........if nothing else, they want a Toronto store where they can play with the format and local people from HQ can see how it works.
 
We used to travel to the Laird Longos just because. It didn’t hurt that we could hit up Amsterdam Brewery at the same time.
 
The Laird Longos and Leaside Sobeys are very near each other. Going to be interesting to see if they consolidate.

Though it seems like both stores were doing fine when in competition with each other. It is not the only oddity in the area as Loblaws has two major stores less than a kilometre away from each other in Leaside too.
 
Many consumers don't care who the parent company is, they just see the banner, so it's quite plausible that you could have a Sobeys, Longos and Farm Boy all within spitting distance of each other. The consumer thinks they have choice, the parent company knows they have the market cornered.
 
Sobey's in Ontario is where it is because of the old Oshawa Group's operations, with only a few completely new stores since the Food City acquisition years ago. Oshawa Group had too many things going on - the larger Food City and Towers chains along with Drug City/PharmaPlus and real estate development, like the Galleria, which had all three chains in there at one time. Loblaws and Dominion/A&P generally had the better locations too.

Towers ended up being sold to Zellers/HBC. The pharmacies were acquired by Katz. The grocery stores by Empire. Price Chopper was the worst of the three discount brands (vs. Food Basics and No Frills.) And Empire decided to downgrade a lot of the old Food City stores to Price Chopper rather than bring them up to Sobey's standards.

The one thing they finally did right was completely overhaul the discount division with the Freshco brand. Otherwise, it's just been about acquisitions (Safeway Canada, Farm Boy, Longo's). At least Longo's gets them better supermarket locations than the Oshawa Group purchase did.
 
The Big Carrot is set to carry out a modest expansion of its Danforth store.

The body care area will be shifted across to the westerly building, beside their apothecary.

That existing body care area is set to become their bulk foods space.

While the existing bulk foods will be given over to more room for produce.
 
I guess this is appropriate here though it's not "downtown" centric, maybe the mods should change it to "general grocery store news" or something; today the George Weston company (owners of Loblaws) announced they are putting their Weston Foods bakery business up for sale. This includes the Loblaws brands like ACE Bakery and La Baguetterie, and also the national bread brand Country Harvest.

EDIT: This could be fallout from the bread price-fixing scandal.
 
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Jonny5 said:
I guess this is appropriate here though it's not "downtown" centric, maybe the mods should change it to "general grocery store news" or something, today the George Weston company (owners of Loblaws) announced they are putting their Weston Foods bakery business up for sale. This includes the Loblaws brands like ACE Bakery and La Baguetterie, and also the national bread brand Country Harvest.
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ACE Bakery is overrated in my opinion so is Country Harvest. I would rather have freshly baked bread from Calabria or a smaller bakery like San Remo. etc.

I am a firm believer in buying local, they put more care into the product than larger mass production companies.
 
Richard White said:
ACE Bakery is overrated in my opinion so is Country Harvest. I would rather have freshly baked bread from Calabria or a smaller bakery like San Remo. etc.

I am a firm believer in buying local, they put more care into the product than larger mass production companies.
Click to expand...

Ace was good when they were doing all freshly baked products.

Now they are pretty much entirely par-baked, with the stores just finishing them off.

They are still a very good product for what they are; but it's not that same as freshly baked.

But I regularly stock their par-baked product at home in the freezer for when I need a baguette and don't have the time to run out to a good bakery to fetch one (and/or they're closed)
 
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