First Look at One of the Two Fresh & Easy Stores Opening In Sacramento Wednesday

Sacramento Bound

Pictured above is the Fresh & Easy grocery market at Watt Avenue & El Camino Avenue in Sacramento, which opens March 7. The photos were taken last week - the one at top during the day, the one above at night - as workers prepared the store for Wednesday's opening. [Photo credit: Fresh & Easy Buzz.]

Wednesday morning Tesco's Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market will make its long-awaited - and long-postponed - launch in metropolitan Sacramento, California, opening two stores, at Watt Avenue & El Camino Avenue and Mack Road and Franklin Boulevard, in Sacramento.

The following Wednesday, March 14, Fresh & Easy will open three stores in three Sacramento-area cities - Folsom (East Natoma Street and Blue Ravine Road), Elk Grove (Elk Grove Florin Road and Calvine Road) and Lincoln (Lincoln and Sterling Road.)

In November 2011 Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market said it would open a sixth store in the region, at 34th Street and Broadway in Sacramento's Oak Park neighborhood, before the end of March. Fresh & Easy hasn't announced an opening date for that store yet.

Fresh & Easy's Sacramento market region launch is long-awaited, as well as long-postponed, because it was in February 2008 when the fresh food and grocery chain announced its plans to enter the market, listing 19 store locations it said it would start out with.

United Kingdom-based Tesco originally planned to start opening Fresh & Easy stores in metro Sacramento as early as mid-to-late 2009, as part of a planned launch into Northern California. However it postponed the Northern California launch because of Fresh & Easy's poor performance.

Tesco and Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market also decided not to launch into Northern California in 2010, again because of the chain's poor performance and numerous problems.

Finally, in March 2011, Fresh & Easy launched into Northern California. To date there are 19 stores in Northern California - 16 in the San Francisco Bay Area and one each in Fairfield, which is on the outer border of the Bay Area; Vacaville, which is about midway between Sacramento and the Bay Area; and Modesto, which is about an hour's drive from both Sacramento and the East Bay Area.

The opening of the first two stores in Sacramento on Wednesday, including the unit at Watt Avenue and El Camino Avenue pictured at top, comes a year and five days after Fresh & Easy opened the first two stores in Northern, in San Jose and Danville, as we reported here on March 2, 2011: Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market Opens First Two Stores in Northern California Today.

Coming this week

We'll have a piece in the blog later this week offering analysis on Tesco's move into the metro Sacramento market, along with a competitive analysis of the key food and grocery retailing players in the region.

Suggested reading below: A primer on Tesco's Fresh & Easy in the Sacramento metropolitan market region