The Food City grocery store on McGrady Drive in Cleveland, Tennessee reopens Wednesday following a sweeping remodel and expansion that added a Starbucks café, a sushi bar and dozens of new jobs to the south Cleveland location. Store manager Cody Price thanked loyal customers for their patience during construction and said the finished product is worth the wait.
According to the Cleveland Daily Banner, Food City officials will follow up the reopening with a flag-raising and ribbon-cutting ceremony at the store on November 11. The grand reopening celebration also includes special pricing on select items throughout the store, the paper reports. Price, the store's manager, said he looks forward to sharing the new enhancements with the community and believes shoppers will find them worth the wait.
The project added more than 10,000 square feet of retail space, bringing the store's total footprint to more than 54,000 square feet, per the same report. That mirrors earlier permit coverage from the Banner, which described a planned 10,017-square-foot addition beside the existing 43,788-square-foot store, projecting a finished size of 53,805 square feet and an estimated project cost of $3.2 million. The remodel and expansion also created more than 40 new jobs in the area.
New Departments and Amenities
Shoppers walking into the remodeled store will find a Starbucks café serving hot and cold beverages, breakfast sandwiches and pastries, a feature the Banner's permit reporting had flagged months earlier alongside an updated checkout area and a new floral department counter. The store's food service department now includes a café seating area, a fresh food bar with soup, salad and fruit, a specialty cake corner, a hickory wood smoker, in-store pizza, popcorn, fresh sushi and a fireplace gathering area.
The produce and floral departments were relocated and upgraded with new cases, and the store now features new cash registers, new meat cases and energy-efficient LED lighting throughout. Food City customers will continue to find familiar staff, quality products, customer service and value alongside the new services and conveniences, the company says.
Company Leadership Weighs In
Food City president and chief executive officer Steven C. Smith said the company had completed a significant remodel and expansion at its south Cleveland store, according to the Banner. The McGrady Drive project is part of a broader pattern of reinvestment for the Abingdon, Virginia-based chain; Food City's parent company, K-VA-T Food Stores, has said in the past that it completed expansions at more than 30 stores over the preceding five or six years, according to the Dade County Sentinel.
Other recent projects give a sense of scale. Food City's own announcement said a Blountville, Tennessee expansion, slated to wrap up this fall, would add more than 7,000 square feet and bring that store to nearly 50,500 square feet while creating 40 new area jobs. In Trenton, Georgia, the Sentinel reported a 12,000-square-foot expansion meant to bring that store to 54,000 square feet total, complete with a Starbucks, a fuel station, a Tennessee Valley Federal Credit Union branch and a sit-down café. Supermarket News has also reported that Food City completed remodeling and expansion work at its Dandridge and Kodak, Tennessee stores, with the Kodak project adding 12,500 square feet and its own Starbucks café, and the Dandridge project adding more than 7,000 square feet along with roughly 1,000 new items.
How Big Is Food City, Really?
Figures on the size of K-VA-T Food Stores' overall footprint vary depending on the source and timing. The Banner's reopening coverage states that K-VA-T operates 163 retail outlets across southeast Kentucky, southwest Virginia, east Tennessee, north Georgia and Alabama, while a January company announcement on foodcity.com put the number at 164 outlets, and Supermarket News has separately reported a count of 150 outlets across the same five-state region. The available reporting does not explain the discrepancy.
For now, the headline news for Cleveland shoppers is a store that looks and functions differently than it did before construction began. With the remodel complete and a community ceremony set for next week, the McGrady Drive location becomes the latest entry in Food City's ongoing run of store makeovers across its footprint.
