MIAMI—With Winn-Dixie filing bankruptcy and Amazon getting into the grocery business through the Whole Foods acquisition, the grocery real estate scene could be changing. GlobeSt.com caught up with Justin Berryman, director of Retail Leasing and Aniley Perez
associate of Retail Leasing, at Franklin Street of Miami, to get their insights into what to expect in part one of this exclusive interview.
GlobeSt.com: What kinds of grocers are expanding here? Examples?
Berryman: Publix has and will continue to be the dominant grocer in South Florida. Discount grocers such as Aldi, along with specialty AND gourmet chains like Whole Foods Market—and its new Whole Foods 365 smaller-store concept—and Sprouts are making a push to expand into the market.
Grocery retailers are expanding throughout the tri-county area—Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach—with the specialty and gourmet grocers mostly in proposed retail or mixed-use developments. Supermarket chains like Aldi are now leasing locations to take advantage of vacant junior anchor or subdivided anchor space traditionally held by soft goods retailers that have been hit hard by e-commerce.
GlobeSt.com: What will be the most important grocery real estate trend or trends in 2018?
Berryman: A few companies everyone in the industry will be keeping a close eye on are Winn-Dixie and Amazon-Whole Foods. It will be interesting to see how the anticipated Winn-Dixie Chapter 11 filing plays out over the next six months to a year as they have a large presence in South Florida.
If they announce large-scale store closures, it will require landlords with exposure to get creative and spend money to chop up their boxes. Since Winn-Dixie stores are typically 45,000 to 50,000 square feet, there are few tenant options expanding to backfill that size of anchor space. We should have a better understanding soon of how the Amazon/Whole Foods merger will impact how traditional grocers operate.
GlobeSt.com: Are there other trends we should be watching?
Perez: Another trend to watch for is how grocers will adapt to the consumers preference of ease and convenience through options like curbside pickup/home delivery. Shoppers want to bypass the wait associated with checkout lines by using technology similar to that recently implemented in Amazon's cashier-less convenience store.
(Is a grocery war coming? Get one take here. And find out why Amazon may move into Fort Lauderdale next.)
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