Earlier this month the ribbon was cut on the new Sprouts Farmers Market in Middletown with shoppers filling its spacious parking lots.
It's the second Sprouts in Delaware and arrives in a fast-growing city (officially a town) that already offers a boatload of options for shoppers.
Sprouts hopes to carve out a niche in Middletown with a smaller store format, a large produce aisle, and an emphasis on organic foods. It offers fewer household goods than your typical Acme or Shoprite.
Its target market is families and singles seeking healthier food options.
Sprouts is based in Phoenix and now boasts a coast-to-coast footprint mainly in the Sun Belt but inching its way north.
Sprouts' organic rival, The Fresh Market, has not moved north in Delaware after opening a store in Rehoboth Beach. It does have a store near the Delaware line in Glen Mills, PA.
It's not related to Fresh Grocer, which has a store in Wilmington. (Confusion on my part led to an email from Fresh Grocer's North Carolina headquarters).
Sprouts is not afraid to close underperforming stores but has grown to more than 400 locations, from San Diego to Philadelphia. The publicly traded company has tweaked its format and moved toward less square footage.
The grocery chain has about a dozen and a half stores within a two-and-a-half hour drive from Middletown or north Wilmington.
Middletown will emerge as one of the more competitive markets for Sprouts. In addition to Food Lion, Acme, and Giant, Germany's Aldi and Lidl have Middletown locations. There's also Walmart and the nearby newly opened Target, which have large grocery departments.
Coming to the outskirts is regional grocer Weis, which will operate a location in the Bayberry area. Weis earlier acquired Food Lion stores in southern Delaware as part of an antitrust deal when Giant and Food Lion's Dutch and Belgian parents agreed to a merger.
Not part of the Middletown grocery wars is locally owned Shoprite, which stayed north of the canal. There may not be room for its large-format stores.
Earlier this week, discount grocer Aldi continued its expansion with a store in north Wilmington. Aldi now has ten stores in Delaware and another near the Delaware line in Elkton, MD. Aldi, with its smaller stores, is able to shorten the expansion process by taking vacant strip mall space.
Enjoy your weekend. You can catch up on the week’s top stories in our Saturday Week in Review post. - Doug Rainey, chief content officer.
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