CLEVELAND — Conversations continue Tuesday night between Downtown Cleveland residents, visitors, and officials as a road map is created to fill the former Heinen's grocery storefront on Euclid Avenue and East 9th Street.
RELATED: 'With every loss, there's opportunity:' Shoppers say goodbye to downtown Cleveland Heinen's
July 31 marked the last day Heinen's operated in Cleveland's Downtown.
After 11 years, the homegrown grocer closed its doors, saying the urban outpost wasn’t sustainable.
Heinen’s still has a lease on the space until early 2027. The company, based in Warrensville Heights, announced its decision to close the Cleveland store in late June. A spokeswoman subsequently confirmed that the suburban grocer lost $18 million over its Downtown run.
The city of Cleveland is now working in partnership with a consulting firm called Streetsense to figure out how to attract a successful grocer to the area.
One of the many steps to doing so is having community conversations like Tuesday night's.
Place Consulting Practice lead at Streetsense, Anya Chan told me, "We've partnered with the city and with Downtown Cleveland Inc. to help the community understand the opportunity for grocery, and so tonight is one of our really critical pieces of collecting insights from the local community: residents, employees, industry professionals, brokers, property owners, really get a sense of what is happening on the ground."
From there, Chan said Streetsense will dive into the data to ensure community needs are met.
"I think it can take numerous approaches. At the highest level, we will support [the city] on how to attract a grocer — attracting, opening, finding a space, finding a site, evaluating that site is really what that road map will focus on, and the goal is to find a sustainable operation," Chan said.
To complete a market study on downtown Cleveland, Chan said Streetsense will need four to six weeks. The company is already a few weeks into it.
"We've looked at the competitive landscape, you know, we have to understand that our opportunity exists in an ecosystem of grocery, of retail in Downtown but also in the surrounding markets, and so understanding how people shop, who are the core customers, how are customers shopping, and ultimately what are their spending levels, what are their spending levels on food at home and really understanding what that means from a sales potential for a potential grocer," Chan said.
In doing so, real-time, in-person feedback from visitors and residents is needed.
Reuben Garcia, a longtime downtown Cleveland resident, said the closing of Heinen's has been a big loss. He and others shared that sentiment on Tuesday.
"There was a huge sense of community inside of that store," Garcia said. "People would go in and then stay there for a couple of hours drinking wine and buying Mitchell's ice cream and doing all those things that we know Clevelanders tend to do, which is hang out with each other, and that's where the big loss comes into play. More importantly, there's also lower-income people that were using that store. You've got to give them (Heinen's) credit. They tried. They probably didn't have the right model, but now, you know, we need to get this going really quickly."
Garcia said he felt as if the conversation between everyone went well and was very passionate at points.
"We feel that we're underserved, even when the Heinen's was here. I think that's the general gist that I got and, you know, what you want though is to make sure that we're actually being heard because a lot of the times, you know, you do these things and then you sit down and three or five years later, nothing has happened and in this case we want to make sure that things happen and they happen quickly," Garcia told me on Tuesday.
He said Downtown Cleveland deserves a full-service grocery store and believes the area is still very much a viable option.
From Tuesday's conversation, the people who attended are looking for the next grocer to be senior-friendly, not for profit, locally owned, accessible and affordable.
"I think there's opportunities to work with Playhouse Square. I think there's opportunities to work with Sherwin-Williams. I think there's opportunities to maybe even look at some of the other models that are being thrown around in the country and that we get that full-service grocery store that we really deserve," Garcia said.
In his travels, he said he has seen larger grocers make do in smaller cities, so he questions why Cleveland can't do the same.
"There is no excuse not to. OK, like I said, when you see smaller cities that have better solutions than we do, you have to wonder: is there really even the willpower to make it happen? Hopefully, a conversation started like this shows that we do have the willpower because everybody here, like I said, was extremely passionate and everybody here wants it to happen, so we better get it," Garcia said.
It begs the question: is Downtown Cleveland a promising venue for a grocer? I asked Chan.
"It's really impossible to say at this stage," she said. "We look at the current state, and we look at how the downtown is gonna evolve over the next 10 years. It's an evolution. It's a process. It's changed already so much since, you know, the last three years that we were here and so really helping the city kind of fine-tune that operator that meets the customer and the mix of the customers where they are."
Downtown Cleveland, Inc. and the city currently have a survey available to anyone who wishes to partake. The survey takes less than 10 minutes to complete, and responses will be reviewed collectively rather than attributed to individual participants.
The survey is open through Aug. 28.
City leaders say they want the eventual solution to be sustainable rather than simply rushing to fill an empty storefront.
If you want to be part of that survey, click HERE.
For anyone looking for other local grocery options, the North Union Market will soon be presenting the City of Cleveland Farmer's Market.
It will be available on Tuesdays from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. starting Sept. 1, running through Oct. 6.
The market will be located in Downtown Cleveland on Mall B.
