Did you see the recent email about Chicago Market's Market Study?

Hungry for more details about the report? 

Here's some more in-depth information that came out of the Market Study, which was funded by our recent ownership drive:

• Our "trade area" (the space bounded by Edgewater on the north, Roscoe Village on the south and Albany Park on the west) is still underserved by food stores, and there is plenty of room for more retailers.
• Our area overall has an extremely dense grocery-shopping population of over 250,000, projected to grow moderately over the next five years. This is encouraging as we seek to build to at least 3,000 co-op Owners by the time we open our store's doors -- that's less than 1% of the total, and so it continues to feel like an achievable, viable goal.
• More than 90% of people in our neighborhoods have a propensity to buy natural foods (e.g. sustainable, organic, local) - and of these, 57% have a propensity that's "above average" or better. That's great news for a store like Chicago Market.
• Our analysis projects that we should be able to bring in at least $12 million in grocery sales each year. That's a lot of healthy, local food brought to our community (not to mention, a tremendous economic impact)!
• Twenty-six different stores in our area were identified as "grocery competition" and we received analysis of the sales volume and other factors for each, that will impact specific site choices for Chicago Market and understand our own likely sales volume. 
• Net, the study confirms that our area can support and is in fact a "very good" marketplace for our store and vision.
• While we are still actively evaluating many sites, we chose 3 early contenders and evaluated them specifically. Projections for each met the minimum sales volume we've identified in our business plans to date. 
• But we also saw a more than 40% swing in weekly sales projections and a 50% difference in projected sales per square foot, between these different locales! This reinforces for us that it's as important to get the right space as it is to get the most quickly negotiated space for our store. As eager as we all are to open the doors, our patient and careful work now will ensure we're financially strong and able to flourish.

• Having done the base analysis, we'll now be able to feed our actual final contenders through this same model and move quickly to negotiate real estate and the next phase of our funding, once we're convinced we've found the best possible site.

Finally, the study did give us some recommendations for sections of our trade area that appear to be most underserved versus their potential/propensity to buy, and these will be useful to us as we continue to evaluate additional locations. Please understand that for competitive reasons, we can't reveal addresses for a bit. Our site team is hard at work looking at each site in more depth and negotiating on behalf of our Owners.