PORT ANGELES — Saar’s is returning to Port Angeles under a new name.
Greg Saar, who owns Saar’s Market Place and Super Saver Foods, announced Monday his company purchased the shuttered Haggen grocery store for $1.56 million with plans of opening a Super Saver Foods by next spring.
The property at 114 E. Lauridsen Blvd., formerly Haggen Northwest Fresh, is appraised at $4,787,471 taxable value.
His goal is for the store, which is said to cater to people who prefer to cook at home, is for it to be renovated and open by spring of next year. With it, he hopes to bring 70 to 100 jobs to Port Angeles.
“We think Port Angeles is a great opportunity,” Saar said, adding that residents now have another option for shopping. “It’s a great market.”
Saar said there isn’t an effort to expand the company, but that he’s always looking for opportunities that make sense. For him, Port Angeles made sense. He said he’s been looking at the property for the past six months.
The Oak Harbor-based company is nearly finished in a rebranding effort as it revamps and modernizes its Saar’s Market Place stores and transforms them into Super Saver Foods, he said.
The Port Angeles location will be the eighth Super Saver Foods and will be the ninth store in his portfolio. There is just one Market Place left and it will also be rebranded as Super Saver Foods.
The Port Angeles location will have a deli and a bakery, he said. Its big focus will be on ethnic foods and will boast large selections of Asian and Hispanic foods.
Though the Port Angeles area isn’t as diverse as some of the other areas the store serves, he’s confident people will be interested in the variety.
“Even in areas where there’s not a lot of Asians, there’s still a lot of people that cook Asian food,” he said.
He said his store will boast an “expanded produce and meat” section and provide more variety for people who prefer to cook at home.
“Our concentration is to take care of people that still cook at home,” he said.
He believes the new store will be able to compete in the Port Angeles market, unlike the previous Saar’s Market Place that closed in 2011.
“We were an old tired store out there,” he said. “We felt Port Angeles was a good market for us, but we had an old small store.”
The older store closed about a year after the Walmart Supercenter moved to the east side of Port Angeles. At the time, Market Place’s corporate general manager said Port Angeles already had too many stores.
The former store, a 25,000-square-foot store on the east side of Port Angeles, is about half the size of Saar’s new building, which is more than 47,000 square feet.
“It’s bigger and better,” he said.
The sale closes next month, he said. He’s focusing for the next couple months on a project in Seattle, but said people will likely see activity at the new Port Angeles location at the beginning of the year.
“We’ll be full steam ahead as of the first of the year,” he said.
The former Haggen grocery store building has sat empty since April 2016 after Haggen Northwest Fresh announced it would sell most of its stores to Albertsons.
The Port Angeles store didn’t make the list after Bellingham-based Haggen accepted Albertsons’ $106 million bid to buy 29 of its 32 core stores.
“We’ve had this on our radar for awhile,” Saar said. “It reappeared and we took advantage of it.”
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Reporter Jesse Major can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 56250, or at jmajor@peninsuladailynews.com.
