Let’s be honest – you can’t have a growing residential area without a supermarket: the first thing most prospective homeowners or renters look for when choosing a neighborhood is a convenient place to buy food. Even the most dedicated restaurant hoppers occasionally need a quart of milk, a bag of coffee, a can of soup and/or an egg at 9 p.m. And they need a safe, clean, modern place to buy them.

Additionally, and with all due respect to small local grocers, you really can’t claim to be a city on the comeback without a modern facility, with scanners, etc. (Don’t laugh – the supermarkets in my native New York City installed scanners literally decades behind the rest of the country.)

So it’s a real positive that Food Depot, the first large-scale food market to open in decades has just made its debut in Newark. Located near Interstate 280, the 30,000-square-foot store cost $8 million and created some 100 jobs – undoubtedly a major reason why it received a $2 million loan from Brick City Development Corp., which in November 2010 launched a Supermarket Development Initiative specifically to have at least three new grocery sites under construction within 12 to 24 months. Additionally, a smaller grocer’s initiative has helped other smaller stores renovate.

Equally fortunately, the new Food Depot is owned by locals – Orfilio Chaviano and Nick Gonzalez III both have long worked in family grocery stores in the city, the announcement says.

It’s the next step in what Booker, the officials of BCDC, and others say will be the revitalization of Newark.