Elk Grove’s The Ridge to get a new grocery store, but officials mum on mystery tenant
Elk Grove’s fast-rising The Ridge retail center is making room for its largest tenant yet, but city officials and the center’s developers are saying little about the planned grocery site.
Construction crews are moving dirt to make way for a nearly 42,000-square-foot grocery store that will sit shoulder-to-shoulder with the Costco Warehouse on Elk Grove Boulevard east of Bruceville Road.
Speculation around town and on social media has focused on Amazon and its new Amazon Fresh grocery concept, but Elk Grove’s economic development director demurred when pressed for more detail.
“We are glad to see robust development activity at The Ridge despite the ongoing recession and we look forward to a successful grocery store opening there as soon as possible,” Darrell Doan said in a statement.
The Ridge, with its mix of retail and fast-casual, sit-down and drive-thru dining, continues to fill storefronts despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
City documents requested by The Sacramento Bee reveal Sacramento-based Pappas Investments’ plans for the store’s outer shell. Builders expect to complete the shell by the end of the year.
Pappas representatives declined to comment on the grocery site Thursday.
Once completed, the 41,764-square-foot plan will include more than 25,000 square feet of sales floor, a building permit application shows. Alameda architect MBH has also signed onto the project.
Amazon officials also offered a curt “no comment” to a Bee request to confirm an Elk Grove location.
“Amazon doesn’t comment on rumor or speculation,” spokeswoman Laura Hayes wrote in an email.
Though Amazon officials shrugged off queries as speculation, the company clearly has its eyes on the California and suburban Sacramento market.
Amazon Fresh opened its first store in Woodland Hills last September and by March, Bloomberg was reporting on plans for a coast-to-coast swath of the stores, including sites in the Sacramento suburbs.
The Fresh store concept features an Amazon Dash Cart, a service allowing shoppers to bypass the checkout register, and voice-activated Alexa features “to help customers manage their shopping lists and better navigate our aisles,” say promotional materials, as well as same-day delivery and pick up.
Store images suggest the concept’s most direct comparison is Amazon subsidiary Whole Foods — or more locally, Woodland-based Nugget Markets, whose Elk Grove store sits a block away — with its mix of national, regional and local offerings, in-store bakery and made-to-order hot foods. Other immediate competitors include a Raley’s location less than a mile west at Elk Grove and Franklin boulevards.
Amazon seized on customer demand during the pandemic, adding about 4,000 people to its Sacramento workforce in the past year, a fraction of the 60,000 workers Amazon added to its payroll statewide since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020. Amazon now employs 150,000 workers in California and is one of the Sacramento region’s leading employers.
In Elk Grove, Amazon’s $21 million, 150,000-square-foot fulfillment center employs some 500 workers. Another fulfillment center at Sacramento International Airport swelled from 2,000 workers to now 4,000 employees since last March.
The Elk Grove center also injected e-commerce dollars that factored into the city’s surprisingly strong financial showing during the pandemic. City budget officials in February projected $30 million in sales tax revenue by the end of the fiscal year, $5.6 million more than projected when the city’s budget was adopted last June.
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