by Brad Carlson @ Idaho Business Review
10/16/2006
Whole Foods Market officials have made at least one visit to Boise to check out a downtown-area site for potential store development.
The Austin, Texas-based grocery chain sells natural and organic foods. Although the company has no announcement regarding a Boise location, a spokeswoman said, Whole Foods continues to open stores and seek sites for future stores.
“We are growing, and we’re always looking for great new store sites,” Whole Foods spokeswoman Amy Schaefer said last week. “Some of the most important elements we seek include high foot or vehicle traffic, a 40,000- to 75,000-square-foot location, abundant parking, and 200,000 or more people within a 20-minute drive time.”
Boise City Planning Director Hal Simmons said a local architect, a real estate agent and Whole Foods store-development officials came to Boise about four months ago.
“They came in and asked us for a meeting to show us their concept for a Whole Foods and a hotel on the old University Place site” at Front, Myrtle and Broadway, he said. “They didn’t give a timeline.”
City planners suggested the group meet with Capital City Development Corp., Boise’s urban-renewal agency, Simmons said.
The group has not filed a project application or held a pre-application meeting with Boise city planners, he said. Before an application is filed, a developer first holds a preliminary meeting with Boise planners and a neighborhood meeting, he said.
The city of Boise has the vacant University Place site zoned for residential-office, with design-review approval required, Simmons said. As presented last summer, the Whole Foods store and hotel project would require a conditional-use permit, and probably a height exception for a seven- or eight-story hotel, he said.
White Cloud Coffee founder and CEO Jerome Eberharter, whose company is a supplier to several grocery chains, visited a Whole Foods store in Santa Fe, N.M., early this month. He said a store manager didn’t know of a store planned in Boise, but said the company is aggressively moving toward the Northwest and Intermountain areas.
“I think the market is dynamic enough and also upscale enough to attract that kind of chain,” Eberharter said. “I don’t think it’s a matter of ‘if’ — it’s a matter of ‘when.’”
Wild Oats/
Trader Joe’s
Another sizable retailer of organic and natural foods, Wild Oats Markets, is also seeking a Boise site.
“We have no signed lease in Boise, although it’s a very appealing market to us and we are actively looking for a potential location,” said Sonja Tuitele, spokeswoman for the Boulder, Colo., company. Wild Oats hasn’t confirmed a location or timetable, she said.
Trader Joe’s is a chain of neighborhood grocery stores that stock specialty and private-label items. One rumor had the Monrovia, Calif., company seeking a site in the Treasure Valley.
However:
“Boise isn’t in our two-year plan at this time,” company spokeswoman Alison Mochizuki said.
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