No matter your gastronomic vice, Whole Foods Market’s new Savannah store has you covered.
Java addicts can get their fix by the pound or the steaming cup.
Herbivores have the salad, olive and pickled vegetable bars, as well as aisle upon aisle of healthy foods.
Carnivores can buy prepared pit-cooked barbecue or fresh cuts or catch.
Hop heads can pour a pint or a growler in the “parlor.”
And for sweet tooths, there’s a bakery, gelato bar and a candy wall.
“I just fell in love with that wall,” elementary schooler Lily Harris told her mother, Alison, during a tour of the Whole Foods store Friday while her little brother, Ethan, nodded his agreement.
Whole Foods hosted public tours Friday and Saturday in preparation for Tuesday’s grand opening. Groups of 25 curious Savannahians crowded the front of the store, located on the property long home to the Backus automobile dealership at Victory Drive and the Truman Parkway.
Many tour takers had never shopped at a Whole Foods, the high-end grocer founded 33 years ago in Austin, Texas. The retailer’s unique approach — the store is almost as much an eatery as a supermarket — sent many of the locals home anxious for the store to open.
“This will be my hangout at lunchtime for sure,” said Theresa Myers, a longtime downtown resident. “I’d stay for the rest of the afternoon if they’d let me.”
Whole Foods offers sharp contrasts to its grocery peers in Savannah, from the electric vehicle charging stations in the parking lot to the “healthy eating specialist” stationed at a booth in the store. The healthy eating specialist is available to help shoppers devise a “healthier lifestyle” based around their diets.
“We’re different, no question,” said Kirstin Howard, a Whole Foods employee at an Atlanta-area store who led tours Friday. “You always hear ‘What’s in it?’ questions. What makes us different is what’s not in our products.”
Whole Foods began as a natural foods store and selling healthy and organic products remains a core principle for the company. The produce is not treated with pesticides and the meat comes from animals not subjected to antibiotics or raised in crowded cages or tanks.
Whole Foods refuses to use artificial ingredients in its foods, down to coloring its cake icing with extracts from fruits like blueberries, spices like turmeric and vegetables like spinach leaves.
“Don’t worry, the green icing doesn’t taste like spinach,” Howard told her tour group.
Whole Foods’ Savannah store will open at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday with a “bread-breaking” ceremony. The company favors the approach to a more traditional ribbon-cutting because it symbolizes Whole Foods breaking bread with its community.
Shoppers who arrive in advance of the “bread-breaking” will be entered in a raffle for Whole Foods gift cards. The raffle tickets will be handed out between 8 a.m. and 8:30 a.m., and it is not necessary to arrive earlier than 8 a.m. or “camp out,” as Howard put it.
Anyone at the store by 8:30 a.m. will get a raffle ticket, she said.
The store opening will end years of public anticipation. Whole Foods was an oft-rumored tenant for several potential commercial developments over the years, including one planned for where Abercorn Terrace sits now and another near Wilshire Avenue on Savannah’s southside.
The closure of the Backus dealership in October 2009 and its listing for sale added to the speculation. The property went under contract to the current developers in April 2011.
Whole Foods was officially announced as the anchor tenant in May 2012.
The store will employ 125 workers, including many “experts” in the areas they work, according to Howard.
ABOUT WHOLE FOODS MARKET
Friends John Mackey and Rene Lawson opened a natural foods store in 1978 in Austin, Texas. Two years later, they partnered with the leaders of another natural grocery, Craig Weller and Mark Skiles, to open the original Whole Foods store on Sept. 20, 1980. The store measured 10,500-square-feet and employed a staff of 19.
Four years later, the quartet opened new locations in Houston and Dallas and later bought the Whole Foods Co. of New Orleans in 1980. Whole Foods entered the California market in 1989, beginning a rapid growth period that started on the West Coast and spread to the Northeast, the Midwest and the South, including six stores in Atlanta. Whole Foods went international after the turn of the century with locations in Canada and the United Kingdom.
Source: www.wholefoodsmarket.com