It wasn’t until 1982 that Longo Brothers Fruit Market Inc. BB #:154544 Vaughan, ON, opened its third location, in then-rural Oakville, but it has picked up the pace of expansion since then. The company has 36 stores and is working on a new site in Brooklin, Ontario, set to open in the summer of 2022.
The chain has no plans to venture out of the province, according to Mimmo Franzone, director of produce and floral at Longo Brothers, though this could change under its new ownership.
In recent years, one area of emphasis has been smaller format, convenience-focused stores in urban Toronto.
“Longo’s has followed bigger competitors down the multiformat path, allowing the chain to tuck into urban markets and take advantage of niche opportunities,” says Carol Spieckerman, president of Spieckerman Retail in Bentonville, AR.
In 2019, the company announced a new, 23,000-square-foot store located on the ground floor of an apartment building in the Liberty Village neighborhood. The store features branded menu items in its restaurant, craft beers created with Amsterdam Brewing Company, and a coffee shop collaboration with Jacked Up Coffee.
The same year, Longo’s opened The Market at Brookfield, a convenience-focused urban concept located in an office complex in downtown Toronto.
Also in 2019, Longo’s debuted Pronto Eats, a cashless, 1,000-square-foot format focused on prepared and partially-prepared meals and snacks. Located in Hudson’s Bay Centre, a shopping mall and office development connected to downtown Toronto’s PATH pedestrian tunnel, the shop includes Longo’s Café service and delivery, and pickup through Grocery Gateway, as well as a grab-and-go meals kiosk.
Pride of place
“There will be select opportunities to continue to expand in Toronto,” predicts Jon Hauptman, senior director of analytics at Inmar Intelligence, Winston-Salem, NC, who believes the population in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) region continues to grow. He expects these urban formats to offer more potential than full-sized groceries.
“Longo’s has been clever in the development of new format types to meet the needs of dense urban areas.”
That said, the company has also been expanding its traditional store presence on the outskirts of the GTA.
Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, notes that Longo’s strength has traditionally been in the Toronto suburbs and the Greenbelt that circles the central Toronto area.
As the regional transportation system has expanded outward, Longo’s has more recently ventured outside the Greenbelt into other parts of Ontario, such as Guelph, that sit on the line between suburban and rural communities.
“They’ve been able to achieve some success outside the Greenbelt,” observes Charlebois, noting population growth in these outer areas.
The rise in remote working, which many believe will continue after the pandemic, as well as high retail prices in Toronto’s city center, suggest the trend is likely to continue.
This is an excerpt from the Toronto & Ontario supplement to the May/June 2021 issue of Produce Blueprints Magazine. Click here to read the whole issue.
