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Fareway to open meat market in Luverne at Main and Hwy 75

Lead Summary
By
Lori Sorenson

A meat market will return to Luverne later this year when Fareway Stores takes over the former W-2’s building at the corner of Highway 75 and Main Street.
Fareway will lease the building from Luverne Properties for at least two years with the option to purchase it if all goes well.
Fareway real estate director Koby Pritchard discussed plans at Monday’s meeting of the Luverne Economic Development Authority.
“With our investment in this leased building, our hope is — assuming things go well — to bring our standard, larger footprint meat market to Luverne,” Prichard said.
“Looking down the road, that’s Fareway’s goal.”
The business would hire at least two full-time employees.
While no formal agreements are in place, the company is eyeing the city-owned lot across the intersection (formerly Remedez).
Pritchard attended Monday’s Luverne Economic Development Authority meeting for a grant application through the city’s Historic Façade Improvement Program.
The company is investing $69,000 in renovations to the façade of the building, and the LEDA approved a $21,000 grant to support it. Fareway will forego the loan option available with the program.
The scope of work includes new siding, fresh paint, new signage, LED lighting on the south and west, blackout glass, a new door, a walk-in cooler, and parking lot improvements.
Construction will start in the coming weeks and wrap up later this summer.
 
Meat market with groceries, not grocery store with meat counter
Pritchard told the LEDA board that the meat market is only part of the company’s long-range plans in Luverne.
“What we’re talking about today is a very small portion of the project in general because our investment will be a lot bigger than the $69,000 in just requesting the façade grant,” Pritchard said.
“We’re looking to make sure we have a chance to redevelop and build new if we want. The beauty of that is if we’re operating well out of this footprint and we decide we want to put our standard meat market in Luverne, then the doors never close, which is a really big deal, too, for us.”
The 2,300-square-foot building is smaller than Fareway’s typical meat market, and the only one of its kind in Minnesota.
“As our meat market concept has grown, we have a few different versions and types of markets, and we felt this concept fit Luverne,” Pritchard said.
In the company’s first venture of this kind in Minnesota, Fareway Meat Market will be a full-service butcher shop that will also offer ancillary grocery items.
“It’s Fareway Meat and Grocery, not Fareway Grocery and Meat,” Pritchard said. “It’s the backbone of what we do.”
He said the company was looking for a community to test this kind of market.
“With W-2 meats having already been here, a group of people from Fareway came and looked at Luverne, and we were all just blown away by the community,” he said.
“It’s just a wonderful town of 5,000 people that is growing, but still has that small-town feel. It has a great downtown and it checked all the boxes of a community we look for. It’s phenomenal.”
 
Patience pays off
Gary Papik is among six local investors comprising Luverne Properties LLC. He said he’s been holding out for a business like Fareway to come into the building.
“There was a lot of other interest in the building, but we waited,” Papik said. “We knew it needed to be a meat market, because that’s what the people in Luverne were asking for.”
He said the location is also well-suited for a meat market.
“It is great when you can stop in quick to get what you need and get on to your next thing,” Papik said. “This location is ideal for that, as opposed to an office building or something else.”
He pointed out that W-2’s Quality Meats left town for staffing reasons and pending retirements, not because there wasn’t enough support for a meat market.
“The business was here, but they were at a point in their lives where they needed to leave,” Papik said.
Pritchard praised the Luverne Properties group members for their help.
“Gary has been a wonderful partner to work with. His whole group has been great,” he said. “Anything we needed they helped with and were really excited about this potential investment.”
Fareway is headquartered in Boone, Iowa, near Ames and has 129 stores, including both full-service stores and meat markets, in six states, with another opening next month in a seventh state.
That includes the store in Worthington that opened in 2009 and two full-service stores in Sioux Falls, as well as stores in Tea and Harrisburg in South Dakota.
The new one at 41st and Ellis in Sioux Falls is one of the newer stores that Pritchard encourages people to visit to get a concept of Fareway’s newer model.
“It will be interesting what happens with this location — what I consider to be the best corner in town —because it’s so different than your standard Fareway,” he said.
“The biggest message is our excitement to grow our brand and market in Luverne – a new concept like this meat market.”

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