Wegmans, based in Rochester, N.Y., is a company known for shopping on a grand scale, with sushi and thin-crust pizza served in bustling cafes. But it will cut its footprint to 70,000 square feet when it opens in the Chestnut Hill Square development, hardly small, but tiny compared to the chain’s 138,000-square-foot behemoth in Northborough.
“We want to have most of the things we have in all our stores, but can you have a Market Cafe that seats 300 people and serves chef-driven meals and 700 different types of produce?’’ said Jo Natale, director of media relations at Wegmans. “We haven’t quite figured that out yet.’’
It is an equation most grocery corporations are contemplating as more people migrate from suburbs to cities. They are all “on the prowl’’ for city real estate, said Kevin Griffin, president of the Griffin Report of Food Marketing, a Duxbury trade publication.
In the past 30 years, the urban grocery store landscape has changed dramatically. Cities once hosted a cadre of family-run markets, but they disappeared for a number of reasons, including the rise of convenience stores like 7-Eleven and Tedeschi Food Shops, said Griffin.
As suburbs become “over stored’’ and independent grocers are fewer, cities are now hot spots for food chains, said Griffin. “Grocery stores need to get back to urban areas,’’ he said. “They need to reinvest and revitalize the areas they walked away from.’’
The smaller stores that Wegmans and Walmart are building help extend their brands. “If you can have a Wegmans experience in a smaller footprint, people are going to dig that,’’ said Griffin.
Even Walmart, the company most synonymous with superstore, has been building “neighborhood markets’’ about one-third the size of its big boxes. The company has proposed building a 34,000-square-foot store specializing in fresh food in Somerville on the site of a former Circuit City.
