Work began this week on a new Heritage Coffee café inside the Foodland IGA store in downtown Juneau.
The café will be located in roughly the same area as the espresso stand, which had been operated by Foodland. Heritage will have its own entrance and seating area. Grady Saunders owns the coffee roasting company, which already has seven locations in Juneau.
“It’ll be a little bit different shape than the way the coffee stand was before,” Saunders said. “There will be more room. There will be an interior door, 10 or 12 feet wide, that’ll open into the grocery store, along with some windows that look into the grocery store, as well as an exterior entrance separate from the grocery store entrance, and windows that look out into the parking lot as well.”
Foodland was serving Heritage coffee at its espresso stand. But Saunders says they’ll have more products available once the new shop opens.
“We’ll have great baked products, some from the grocery store and some of our own, as well as all of our great coffees,” Saunders said. “We’ll have, like in our downtown café and at 2nd Street, we’ll have some of the coffees that we don’t sell in the grocery store, some of the unique coffees all the time.”
Tyler Myers is President and CEO of the Myers Group, which owns Foodland IGA. He approached Heritage about taking over the coffee shop.
“I think that it makes a lot of sense to have a space where customers can come in and sit and have more of a café sort of an experience,” he said.
Myers, who lives and works in Washington state, says he’s excited about leasing space to local businesses like Heritage. True North Federal Credit Union recently opened a branch inside Foodland as well.
“It’s not uncommon for banks – in this case a credit union – to be inside of a grocery store. So we saw that as a good fit,” Myers said. “Then the folks that come in and get coffee through Heritage, they’ll be able to sit inside their space or out in the atrium space that we’re going to have.”
Myers says the atrium space is due to be remodeled at some point. After moving into the Foodland Shopping Center in September 2012, he announced big plans for remodeling the entire store. He says it’s taken longer than expected, but more improvements are coming.
“It’s just a matter of putting the pieces together,” he said. “And unfortunately that’s what’s been taking much longer than I had hoped.”
Myers continues to be interested in attracting a pharmacy to the store.
Construction on the new Heritage café is expected to last through January. Foodland customers can continue getting their coffee fix at the deli during the remodel.
