Fareway Stores Inc. is remodeling the former W-2’s Quality Meats store at the intersection of Main Street and Highway 75 in Luverne to open a meat market this fall.
According to company project manager Mark DeYoung, the store may be ready to open in mid-September. “We’re very excited about what this market will do in Luverne,” he said.
In the company’s first venture of this kind in Minnesota, Luverne’s Fareway Meat Market will be a full-service butcher shop that will also offer ancillary grocery items.
“It’s Fareway ‘Meat and Grocery,’ not Fareway ‘Grocery and Meat,’” Fareway real estate director Koby Pritchard said when plans were announced in May. “It’s the backbone of what we do.”
He said the company was looking for a community to test this kind of market.
“With W-2 meats having already been here, a group of people from Fareway came and looked at Luverne, and we were all just blown away by the community,” he said.
“It’s just a wonderful town of 5,000 people that is growing, but still has that small-town feel. It has a great downtown and it checked all the boxes of a community we look for. It’s phenomenal.”
Fareway will lease the building from Luverne Properties for at least two years with the option to purchase it if all goes well.
The company is investing $69,000 in renovating the façade of the building, and the Luverne Economic Development Authority approved a $21,000 grant to support it.
The scope of work includes new siding and paint, new signage, LED lighting on the south and west, blackout glass and a new door.
A 10-by-14-foot walk-in cooler will be added on the north side, and excavation work around the exterior includes a “grease interceptor,” to catch solids from butcher shop cleanup.
Part of a larger plan
Pritchard told the LEDA board that the meat market is only part of the company’s long-range plans in Luverne.
“What we’re talking about today is a very small portion of the project in general because our investment will be a lot bigger than the $69,000 in just requesting the façade grant,” Pritchard said in May.
“We’re looking to make sure we have a chance to redevelop and build new if we want. The beauty of that is if we’re operating well out of this footprint and we decide we want to put our standard meat market in Luverne, then the doors never close, which is a really big deal, too, for us.”
The 2,300-square-foot building is smaller than Fareway’s typical meat market, and the only one of its kind in Minnesota.
“As our meat market concept has grown, we have a few different versions and types of markets, and we felt this concept fit Luverne,” Pritchard said.
If the business goes well with the small meat market, the company has an option to acquire property across the intersection to build a stand-alone meat market store.
The city owns three parcels on the corner of Main and Highway 75 (102 S. Kniss Ave., formerly known as Remmedez, 108 S. Kniss Ave. and 309 W. Main St.).
The city signed an option and right of first refusal with Fareway to purchase the property for $125,000.
The option gives Fareway the exclusive right to purchase the property until January 1, 2024.
If the option is not exercised by then, Fareway still has a right of first refusal to purchase the property by Jan. 1, 2025, in the event that the city has a legitimate offer from a third party.
If Fareway elects to purchase the property, a development agreement would stipulate that the property must be developed within two years of acquisition.