The crowd gathered before dawn at the Lakeland opening was larger than normal due to the fact that Lakeland is Publix's hometown and buzz had been building about the store for the past year. It’s location at 4747 S. Florida Avenue was the site of a former Kmart that was torn down to make room for a new shopping center that would be home to the GreenWise Market and Lakeland’s first Home Goods, a fast-growing concept from the TJX Companies. The location in Boca Raton was also a newly constructed store.
“These are the first two stores that were intended to be ground up,” Brous said.
Following the Lakeland and Boca Raton openings, and an opening the prior week in Lexington, S.C., there are now a total of six GreenWise stores, which are described as new-generation stores. That’s because the concept was introduced a decade ago and then re-imagined last fall when a location was opened in Tallahassee. A total of 12 locations have been announced, but beyond that the company hasn’t provided a growth target.
Nevertheless, it is clear Publix is more serious about serving a shopper segment that it’s conventional stores aren’t able to fully satisfy. The discriminating natural and organic shoppers, those who question the type of casing used to make sausage or seen studying labels of unfamiliar brands throughout the stores, GreenWise aspires to satisfy are viewed as complementary as opposed to cannibalizing existing Publix stores. That thesis will be put to the test in Lakeland where the new GreenWise Market is directly across the street from a traditional Publix.
Publix operates more than 1,200 grocery stores in seven southeastern states in the Southeast. The Lakeland, Fla.-based company is No. 5 on Progressive Grocer’s 2019 Super 50 list of the top grocers in the United States.