Stop & Shop will close its Allston location on Everett Street Friday, but neighborhood shoppers shouldn’t fret — there’s a new location opening right across the road.
The new supermarket is central to the Allston Yards development project, a 1.2 million-square-foot campus on the edge of the Massachusetts Turnpike. The 52,000-square-foot store occupies the space under a 165-unit residential community — including 21 income-restricted units — that opened earlier this year.
Stop & Shop CEO Gordon Reid said the development process gave the supermarket chain the opportunity to implement some new ideas for the younger demographic that is increasingly settling in the Allston-Brighton area.
“We’ve been in some locations for many, many years,” he said. “Locations change, communities change. We try and change with them.”
The new store will include an expanded section for multicultural cuisine (with nearly 800 new products), a kosher-certified bakery, and an expanded grab-and-go section. Shoppers will also be able to use the building’s validated-parking garage.
“It is a younger community, a working community, people that commute back and forth to work,” said Tom Ferreira, the company’s vice president of operations. “We tried to tailor it to that kind of customer who’s going to probably come in here five or six times a week, versus shopping once during the week or once a month.”
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Stop & Shop’s older Everett Street store has been open since 1998.
Reid said the new location will employ approximately 200 people — the 85 staff members of the existing Everett Street location, and roughly 115 newly hired workers from the surrounding community.
“It’s just amazing to get to this point where you’re creating a whole environment and town that’s going to really change people’s lives,” Reid said.
Stop & Shop is headquartered in Quincy and owned by a Dutch conglomerate. It operates nearly 400 stores across the Northeast.
The Allston Yards project is part of a broader effort to redevelop the former industrial zone on the edge of the Massachusetts Turnpike, which also includes the nearby Boston Landing project.
“This is just the first phase of something that’s much bigger,” said Stephen Karp, CEO of New England Development. “We have to finish everything that we’ve committed to starting.”
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Once completed, Allston Yards will include a one-acre park, nearly a half-million square feet of commercial space, and 900 residential units (including those above the new supermarket).
After closing its doors for good on Friday, the old Stop & Shop will be demolished, and a new mixed-use building will be raised in its place as part of the Allston Yards development.
James Arthur Jemison, director of the Boston Planning & Development Agency, said Friday that the Allston Yards project was a bright example for the rest of the city as it races to approve and build desperately needed housing.
“What this development community came together to do is what we need to do in the city every single day,” he said.
Camilo Fonseca can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @fonseca_esq and Instagram @camilo_fonseca.reports.