Northeast Florida’s grocery market has a new player under construction.
The city issued a permit March 5 to convert the former Staples store at southwest Beach and University boulevards into a Gordon Food Service Store and delivery service.
Schmid Construction Inc. of Winter Garden will renovate the 28,721-square-foot store at 5800 Beach Blvd. at a project cost of $3.59 million. It will include grocery and food preparation space.
It comes after the city issued a permit Nov. 21 for Ticon Inc. to remove the building’s interior finishes.
Fishbeck Engineers Architects Scientists Constructors of Grand Rapids, Michigan, is the consultant.
The building is in the Boulevard Corners Shopping Center, which is owned by 116 W Flagler Street LLC of Miami.
Plans show wall and center freezers; popcorn and rotisserie rooms and a future tortilla room; general sales; fresh meat and dairy coolers; and meat, produce and produce coolers.
There are van delivery and receiving areas in the back as well as a back-room area.
The move returns groceries to the corner, where Albertsons operated decades ago in another part of the shopping center.
The store will be the first in Northeast Florida for Gordon Food Service.
Gordon Food Service is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
It offers membership services, but customers are not required to be a member and no membership fee is needed to shop at Gordon Food Service, which operates similarly to wholesale clubs.
“Gordon Food Service Store carries thousands of the most popular Gordon Food Service products at wholesale prices. The stores are open to the public seven days a week and do not require a membership fee,” says the GFSstore.com site.
It distributes to restaurants; health care facilities; universities; camps; and other food-service operations, which may qualify to receive truck deliveries based on their product order size
In October, Colliers Senior Vice President Gary Montour said Gordon Food Service probably will open in the fourth quarter of 2024.
He represented the Boulevard Corners landlord in the lease. He said Atlantic Retail of Miami represented Gordon Food Service in the deal.
Gordon Food Service has 14 distribution centers, including in Miami and Plant City, to serve restaurants, health care, schools and other customers that serve groups of customers.
The ScrapeHero.com data site says Gordon Food Service has 194 stores in 162 cities in 17 states, including 21 in Florida. The closest to Jacksonville is in Daytona Beach.
A decade ago, plans showed that Gordon Food Service intended to open an almost 16,000-square-foot GFS Marketplace at 13423 Beach Blvd. The store wasn’t built and the developer sold the property to AD Development LLC of Jacksonville Beach for a strip retail center.
The GFSstore.com site says that privately owned Gordon Food Service, in operation for more than 125 years, serves the Midwest, Northeast, Southeast and Southwest regions of the United States and coast-to-coast in Canada.