Work began yesterday on a new downtown True North Federal Credit Union branch inside Foodland IGA. Next in line is welcoming Heritage Coffee Roasting Company.
The credit union will be located in front of the grocery store’s check stand area where the service center used to be.
True North’s Juneau area branch manager Jacob Parrish says the new location will offer a parking lot, better hours, and more services.
“It’ll be a full service branch so everything that was available at the previous one will still be available to members. Only this time, we’re also going to be putting a brand new ATM that’s going to have the ability to receive checks and cash for deposit.”
The current Court Plaza branch has three employees, which will likely increase to four at the new location. Construction completion is scheduled for late-September and new hours will be Monday through Saturday, 10 am to 6 pm.
Foodland owner Tyler Myers says his Washington-based company, Myers Group, also just signed a sub-lease agreement with Heritage Coffee Roasting Company to run an in-store café.
When Heritage Coffee opens up in Foodland, the grocery store will no longer run its current espresso department.
“It was just a matter of who was going to run the coffee shop and I felt that they could do a really, really good job and they felt it would be a great location for them and it seemed to make sense for everybody so we’ll focus on selling groceries and they’ll focus on being great at coffee,” Myers explains.
Myers says the current coffee stand employees have been given the option of either working for Heritage or staying with Foodland in a different department.
Heritage Coffee president Grady Saunders says the in-store café will occupy 700 square feet, a larger area than what the coffee stand is in now.
“It’ll just be mostly drinks and it’ll have its own seating. I think three tables and a bar with five or six seats in it. They’re putting windows in to look out into the parking lot. We’ll have wireless like we do in all our cafes and our basic design.”
This will be Heritage Coffee’s ninth location in Juneau.
Next to Foodland is 6,000 sq. ft. of empty space, which used to be part of Foodland Super Drug.
Gary Rosenberger is president of Foodland Inc., the company that owns the Foodland shopping plaza. He says Myers has expressed hopes of using the empty space to expand Foodland into a “one-stop-shop” that would include a pharmacy, the liquor store located next door, and the hardware store on the other side of the plaza.
“I’d almost rather have it vacant and wait for his stuff to come up than to give it away just willy-nilly, ’cause if he doesn’t have the room, he can’t do the work. I think his ideas are nice. They’re good layouts. I’ve seen what he wants to do. When you walk into the store you just got this freedom to go from one to the other without going into the weather,” Rosenberger says.
Myers says it’s undetermined whether he will lease and expand into the vacant space, although he says he is working on bringing a pharmacy into the store.
