LOS ANGELES -- Tesco PLC's Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market Inc. opened its first Fresh & Easy Express store last week in Los Angeles. "At 3,000 square feet, the Express store looks and feels very similar to our standard F&E store and offers everything that our customers have come to love about Fresh & Easy, just in a smaller footprint," Brendan Wonnacott, the chain's director of neighborhood affairs, told CSP Daily News.
The company will be opening a few more in Southern California over the next several months, he added. "We're always looking to serve more neighborhoods, and these stores should help us venture into neighborhoods that cannot accommodate a standard 10,000-square-foot store and/or are particularly more densely populated where property price is at a premium."
Fresh & Easy has several more stores under construction or planned for the test market of Los Angeles and Orange counties. Los Angeles County locations include Hermosa Beach, San Pedro and USC. Orange County locations include Seal Beach and Laguna Niguel.
These stores will be opening over the next several months, said Wonnacott.
A typical Fresh & Easy has about 5,500 SKUs, and an Express store has about half of that, he said. "There is a heavy focus on fresh items (prepared meals, meat, dairy, produce and bread), but it is still a grocery store, so you will find a good selection of typical grocery items that you wouldn’t find in a c-store."
Wonnacott described it as "a smaller, more convenient grocery store, rather than a traditional c-store."
Click here to view images of Fresh & Easy Express.
Click here to view more images of Fresh & Easy Express on the company's social networking page.
He added, "We've tailored our Express store to the needs of our customers in California and have created a unique model. We have shallower shelving, smaller coffee and microwave units, warmer and softer graphics and portable and lighter shopping carts. The Express stores will enable quick shopping for our busy customers and will meet their needs of food and groceries."
El Segundo, Calif.-based Fresh & Easy, the U.S. operating unit of London-based Tesco, has approximately 180 small-format grocery stores in California, Arizona and Nevada.
Members help make our journalism possible. Become a CSP member today and unlock exclusive benefits, including unlimited access to all of our content. Sign up here.