PORTLAND, Ore. — Come January, New Seasons will no longer be locally owned as their storefront motto reads.
The Portland-based upscale grocer has been sold to a subsidiary of a global South Korean retailer.
West Coast private equity firm Endeavour Capital, which has a Portland office, currently has majority ownership of New Seasons.
KGW's Morgan Romero stood outside the Northwest Portland store and held up a whiteboard with the question: “Why do you shop at New Seasons?”
She asked Portlanders why they choose to spend their money at the neighborhood grocery store, then broke the news about the sale.
Customer's reactions were all across the board; many said they’ll still shop at the grocery store because they live or work nearby and it’s convenient, some said they’re disappointed a local company was bought out by a foreign company, others were indifferent, chalking it up to consolidation in an increasingly global economy, and said it wouldn’t impact their shopping habits.
“It’s a convenient store for me,” shopper Ken Blumenthal said, “I like the products, I like the produce, people are pretty friendly. It’s a nice store.”
When informed it was just purchased by Good Food Holdings, a subsidiary of South Korea’s Emart, Blumenthal said it makes him “a little sad”.
“It’s not going to stop me from shopping here honestly. Convenience trumps almost everything.”
Kristina Alcalde loves the neighborhood grocer because it’s conveniently close to work and she can rely on the food being fresh and local. Her reaction to the news of the sale was perhaps the most animated.
“What? Oh no! Really? Now I’m disappointed,” Alcalde said. “So it’s like Whole Foods – like Amazon buying Whole Foods."
“I understand, you know, I mean it’s a global economy, we have to be global in today’s society. But, like I said, as long as they keep the local touch and we still use the same growers and the same distributors, that type of thing,” Alcalde added. “Getting our wines local, getting our beer local that’s always important. And fruits and vegetables, definitely. I think that I’m going to keep using them. Then if I see stuff different then there will hopefully be other places to try.”
Christina McAlvey is involved in the B Corporation movement and heard the news before we could break it to her.
“I’m really suspect of it but I don’t know enough about this buying company to make an assessment on them,” McAlvey said. “There are lots of good companies that are overseas that do really good work.”
She loves the convenience, selection of locally sourced and natural foods, the company's mission to give back to the community and its dedication to environmental sustainability.
“If New Seasons and the parent company veered away from the original mission that they were based on, yeah, I would probably start looking elsewhere,” she added.
A press release says Good Food Holdings is a natural fit because it supports high quality, independent, regional neighborhood grocers on the West Coast.
But some local New Seasons workers like Chris Fellini feel left out of the conversation.
He wishes the company settled on employee ownership instead, which has been explored over the last few years.
“Definitely a little disappointed because a lot of us were hoping to have more discussions about worker ownership and what that could look like,” Fellini told KGW, “And it just seems like store leadership didn’t really give us a chance to have those conversations or give us chance to sit down and discuss that.”
With this sale, employees at a store in the Seattle area will be out of a job. However the company says it’s working to find them new positions elsewhere in the company.
“We’ve got to ask ourselves what it means when a company that prides itself on local and helping local and regional businesses is bought up by somebody bigger and if they can hold on to that identity or how long it is until that changes,” Fellini said. “And I don’t think it bodes well for the company that this deal was kind of done without any transparency within the company.”
New Seasons says you won't see much change. The same local leadership will be at the helm and it will continue to give 10-percent of after-tax profit to charities. It's also keeping B Corp certification, meaning it meets social and environmental standards.
Jennifer Nolfi, executive director of Portland State University’s Center for Retail Leadership, says this is the right move by the neighborhood grocer.
“If you look at the retail environment right now the consumer is the channel and they want a consistent experience in store, online and on their mobile devices,” Nolfi said. “So the more companies can focus on understanding that consumer and meeting their needs it makes them more successful."
Nolfi doesn't expect the company's mission or model to change. She says in this global economy, with more consolidation occurring, we are going to see more of these opportunities “to leverage resources and identify efficiencies where you can have them, especially in low-margin industries”.