The Winn-Dixie at 6770 Bird Road in Miami rang up its final sales on August 2, closing after 66 years on the same corner of Bird and Ludlam. The site will become an Aldi supermarket, making it the third grocery banner to occupy that corner since 1960.
According to Miami New Times, the location first opened as a Kwik Chek in 1960, an early Winn-Dixie brand before the store eventually took the Winn-Dixie name it carried for decades. Meredith Hurley said all associates at the location received advance notice of the closure, and those employees now have the first opportunity to apply for roles at the new Aldi. In the store's final days, shoppers picked over the shelves for deals of up to 40 percent off remaining goods, with one customer posting on Nextdoor that there was still “lots of ice cream, frozen foods and chocolates!!”
A Statewide Overhaul Reaches Bird Road
The Bird Road closure is just one piece of a much larger transformation. Aldi bought Winn-Dixie's parent company in March 2024, and by February 2025 a group led by Anthony Hucker and C&S Wholesale Grocers bought back roughly 170 of those Winn-Dixie and Harveys locations, according to Grocery Dive. Aldi kept about 220 locations for conversion, 162 of which are in Florida, and plans to complete those conversions by 2027. The Winn-Dixie Company, which rebranded from Southeastern Grocers last fall, still operates around 130 traditional grocery stores with a Florida focus and says it is working with Aldi to support a smooth transition.
Miami-Dade County alone has at least seven Winn-Dixie stores on the Aldi conversion list, per the same Miami New Times report. Hoodline previously reported on South Florida conversions already underway at stores in Aventura, Fort Lauderdale, and on Ives Dairy Road in Miami, where the California Club Winn-Dixie closed in May. Aldi has not announced an opening date for the converted Bird Road store, and conversions typically take about a year to complete.
66 Years of History at One Corner
The Bird and Ludlam location has sold groceries continuously since 1960, when it opened as a Kwik Chek — a banner created in Clearwater in 1952 by parent company Winn & Lovett that also inspired the red checkmark in Winn-Dixie's logo. The store underwent a remodel and produce-department update in August 2018, keeping it running as a full-service supermarket up until this month's closure after 66 years in the neighborhood.
The transition mirrors one already playing out elsewhere in Miami-Dade. The Sunset West Winn-Dixie, at Sunset Drive and 87th Avenue, began its own conversion in 2025 and is nearing completion almost a year later. Other Miami-Dade Winn-Dixie locations have closed around the same recent stretch, including the longstanding store at The Shoppes of Liberty City on NW 54th Street, which shut its doors on August 2 after decades serving that community.
What a Smaller Footprint Means for Shoppers
Part of what makes these conversions notable locally is the sheer size difference between the two chains. A typical Aldi needs only about 19,000 to 22,000 square feet, compared with the 40,000- to 52,000-square-foot layouts standard to Winn-Dixie stores, according to Grocery Dive. That gap often leaves landlords with more than 20,000 square feet of extra retail space to divide among secondary tenants, a pattern already seen in other Florida conversions, including in Neptune Beach and Avon Park, where new tenants such as Dollar Tree moved into leftover space.
The broader push comes as Aldi tries to chip away at Publix's dominance of the Florida grocery market, where Publix held roughly 37 percent of market share as of 2025, followed by Walmart at 26 percent. Winn-Dixie's own roots run back a century, to when founder William Milton Davis opened his first cash-and-carry grocery store in Miami in 1925 before the company later moved its corporate headquarters to Jacksonville in 1944, a legacy Jacksonville officials moved to protect this past May when the city council approved a $12 million incentive package to keep the company's headquarters in town.
