North Beach has waited three years for this: a full-service grocery store back on Bay Street. Grocery Outlet opens Thursday at 350 Bay St., taking over the 30,000-square-foot space that Safeway abandoned in 2023, and the discount grocer is bringing 80-cent avocados and $1.99 pita chips along with it.
The store is owned and operated by Jacqueline and Joel Lanoie, who signed a 15-year lease on the space in early 2025, according to The San Francisco Standard. Grocery Outlet stores are mostly independently owned and operated, and the chain now counts roughly 500 locations nationwide. Joel Lanoie has spent years working in the grocery industry, and the couple, who grew up in Madera in California's Central Valley, now live in the Outer Sunset with their two young children.
An invitation-only preview opening was held Tuesday afternoon, and six people were turned away at the door, the Standard reported. Jacqueline Lanoie said the new Grocery Outlet is bringing the former Safeway location back to life, and that she and her husband plan to bring affordable, quality groceries to North Beach. “The area has a strong need for value groceries,” Joel Lanoie said, noting the neighborhood has lacked grocery options for a few years.
Filling a Gap Trader Joe's Couldn't
Aside from Trader Joe's, Grocery Outlet is now North Beach's only major grocery store. North Beach resident Sydney Andrews told the Standard that Trader Joe's does not carry everything shoppers need, underscoring why a full grocery option still mattered even with the specialty chain nearby. The gap has been felt since Safeway's North Beach location closed in 2023 — a closure Hoodline first reported on back in 2023, and one that CBS News noted left an estimated 20,000 nearby residents across North Beach, Fisherman's Wharf, Russian Hill, and Telegraph Hill without a full-service grocery store within walking distance.
Neighbors Celine Chung and Ken Wu, who live together in North Beach, welcomed the new arrival. Wu said Grocery Outlet's prices are very low, and Chung, who works as a content creator, was among those checking out the store. The Lanoies worked with longtime vendors of the former Safeway to stock the new location, and hired multiple people who live across the street from the store as part of their staffing.
How the Deals Work
Grocery Outlet keeps prices low by purchasing inventory surpluses, packaging changes, discontinued items, and overruns, offering what the chain calls opportunistic products alongside hard-to-find snack brands. The Standard reported that among the deals spotted at the North Beach store were 80-cent avocados, $1.99 pita chips, and $4.99 strawberry Rice Krispie treats ice cream sandwiches. Stock rotates continuously, giving the store a treasure hunt-style shopping experience that regulars of the chain have come to expect.
That value proposition lands at a moment when San Francisco grocery bills already run well above the national average. A June price study comparing 22 major grocery retailers across the city found Grocery Outlet ranked among the top value grocers in a market where everyday food expenses run 15% to 25% higher than the national baseline, according to GroceryChop. San Francisco has no traditional big-box retailers like Walmart within city limits, making discount grocers like this one a rarer commodity than in most American cities.
A Three-Year Path Back From Vacancy
The road to Thursday's opening wasn't quick. Former District 3 Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who had previously called the shopping center a challenging fit and once wanted to redevelop the former Safeway space entirely, reversed course and instead backed public-safety enhancements and local tax incentives that helped persuade Grocery Outlet to commit to the 15-year lease, according to SFGATE. Real estate investment firm Anchor Pacific Capital had purchased the NorthPoint Shopping Centre property in December 2023 for roughly $25.76 million, explicitly aiming to land a new supermarket tenant. City business filings registered in May listed the store's operator as North Beach Grocery Outlet under the entity name Jjkm Market, with more than 50 workers hired from the surrounding neighborhood.
The opening arrives even as San Francisco's grocery landscape keeps shrinking elsewhere. The Lucky supermarket on Fulton Street in NoPa is scheduled to close next month, and Bayview lost its Lucky location less than three years after it opened, leaving that neighborhood reliant on a local Foods Co. and an existing Grocery Outlet, as Mission Local has reported. San Francisco has also seen other grocery closures in recent years, including a Safeway in the Fillmore in 2025 and the Whole Foods at 8th and Market, which closed in 2023.
Some other Grocery Outlet locations in San Francisco — including stores in the Mission, Portola, Bayview, and Richmond districts — have drawn scrutiny for using AI-powered facial recognition software called SAFR Guard at entrances to screen shoppers against retail theft watchlists, per Mission Local's reporting. It remains unclear whether the North Beach location will adopt similar technology. Emeryville-based parent company Grocery Outlet Holding Corp. reported second-quarter net sales of $1.19 billion on Wednesday, even as it moves forward with a corporate plan to shutter 36 underperforming stores nationwide.
For now, North Beach residents are simply glad to have groceries within walking distance again. Hoodline previously caught the store mid-construction, and after years of watching the old Safeway sit dark, the neighborhood finally has its full-service grocer back.
