Willy Street Co-op in Talks for New North Side Location

[1]The exterior of Willy Street Co-op’s original location on Williamson St. (Michael R. Conway/courtesy of Willy Street Co-op)

Madison grocery Willy Street Co-op is in planning stages for the opening of a third location on the city’s North Side, the co-op announced at the end of January.  

The new store would occupy what is now Pierce’s Northside Market on Sherman Ave., and while no formal agreement has been made or lease signed, Brendon Smith, director of communications for the co-op, says if all goes well the store will be open within the next year.

“If we can work everything out and all of our planning and investigation says that this is a good fit for us, we look forward to being open there in the summer,” Smith said.

Easier access for owners and staff, helping more local and organic farmers and producers and serving another Madison neighborhood were all reasons Smith cited behind the co-op’s move toward another store.

“A lot of stores now are starting to carry or have been carrying more organic and local foods, so we’ve seen that around the country. We’ve seen co-ops kind of take a hit as the ideas that they really started have been taken up by other stores. So another part of that is being proactive about competition,”Smith said.

The co-op first started looking into opening a third location in August 2014, and when asked about the possibility of a new store Smith says the response from co-op owners was an overwhelming “yes, yes please.”

The Allied Drive Community Co-op was originally looking at the space for their own grocery store, according to Smith. But with a limited time before Pierce’s was ending its lease and with the challenges of getting a store up and running the Allied Drive Co-op turned to Willy Street Co-op for help — a service Willy Street Co-op tries to offer all co-ops in the area.

“That request for help kind of blossomed into, ‘Hey, why don’t you consider taking over the entire site, have it be a Willy Street Co-op store?’ So it fit in really well with our larger pursuit of looking at options for a third store,” Smith said.

The location matched all of the co-op’s requirements for a third store as well, says Smith.

“So it had to be in a neighborhood, it had to be accessible by bike and bus and foot as well as by car, and it had to be somewhere where we had some owners. So with those big considerations and a bunch of other smaller ones, that site was really attractive,” Smith explained.

The location is much larger than the co-op’s current locations, measuring about 25,000 square feet compared to the 10,000 square feet or so that both the East and West side locations currently occupy.

“That also means that there are some potential opportunities there that we haven’t been able to explore before, so that’s kind of intriguing and a little daunting. It’s outside of our comfort zone but we have some interesting ideas of how we could make that work if it were to work out that we would take over the site,” Smith said.

As far as next steps, Smith says talks with the landlord will continue, as well as internal planning on logistics of the space and conversations with owners, staff and residents of the neighborhood as well. Feedback from all sides has been positive thus far says Smith.

“There’s a lot of great energy around it and it’s up in the air yet, nothing has been decided, but we’re pretty excited about the possibilities,” Smith said.

If all goes well, Smith says the new location should be up and running by summer of 2016.