Vons to Build $8-Million ‘Super’ Store : Garden Grove Market to House Pizza Parlor, Pharmacy and Deli

Vons Grocery Co. is planning an $8-million rehabilitation of a shuttered Garden Grove discount store to make way for a “super” supermarket that officials say will be unique in size and scope in Southern California.

With a 55,000-square-foot sales floor, the store, to be called Vons Pavilion, will be three times larger than an average supermarket and is expected to attract customers from an eight-mile radius.

The market chain hopes to lure shoppers with additional services including a seafood area with large tanks for live fish, a full-service butcher shop, florist, automatic teller machine for banking, pharmacy, bakery, tortilla shop, small pizza parlor, ice cream shop, delicatessen and demonstration kitchen area. Vons officials declined to elaborate further, saying that plans for the large facility are still being developed.

The new store will be located in a defunct Zody’s discount department store on Chapman Avenue west of Brookhurst Street in one of Orange County’s oldest strip shopping centers.

First Phase of Renovation

Vons, with gross annual sales of about $2.5 billion, is one of California’s largest supermarket chains. The El Monte-based company operates 171 stores statewide, Davila said.

The move to the Zody’s building, which has been vacant since December, would be the first phase of a comprehensive rehabilitation of the entire shopping center, said George L. Tindall, Garden Grove’s assistant city manager. The center is located in the city’s Brookhurst-Chapman redevelopment area.

E. John Graichen, Garden Grove’s director of economic development, said plans for refurbishing the former Zody’s building include a face lift of the exterior, creating an “open-frame, high-tech, tubular structure which will provide a very modern and clean look.”

Vons will move its existing store in the center to the new location and that building will be enlarged to house a dry goods retailer, Tindall said. An existing Newberrys department store would also be refurbished in the redevelopment effort.

Graichen said the city expects to gain additional sales tax revenue from the new Vons store, which he sees as a catalyst for further renovation of the center.