The City’s transportation committee has signed of on some road improvements along Idylwyld Drive to accommodate traffic for a new downtown grocery store in Midtown Plaza.

Arbutus Properties is in the midst of signing a long-term lease with Midtown Plaza to bring a Pitchfork MARKET + Kitchen to the downtown. Murray Totland, Director of Planning with Arbutus says they’ll discuss a tax abatement with Midtown Plaza personnel, something the Vancouver-based development company was originally seeking from the transportation committee.

Totland expects 80 per cent of the clientele at the grocery store would be those using a vehicle to get there. That’s why Arbutus was seeking a fully signalized intersection at Idylwyld and Auditorium Drive among other changes to accommodate increased traffic.

Saskatoon hasn’t been home to a downtown grocery store since 2004 when the Extra Foods on 3rd Avenue closed its doors. Since then, the Shop Easy Foods in City Park has closed and last week when the news came public that Arbutus was looking to bring a grocery store to downtown, the Extra Foods on Broadway closed its doors for one final time.

It’s expected the new grocery store could open as soon as late 2022, but Totland says realistically the store will likely open in early 2023 if everything goes to plan.

Totland also said shopping carts being stolen or misplaced throughout downtown wouldn’t be an issue. “We’re quite concerned that they don’t disappear, we’re going to use technology to our advantage here. There are a number of systems on the market where essentially you establish an electronic perimeter around your store and the cart wheels will actually lock up once you try and go past that perimeter.”

The road infrastructure upgrades are estimated to cost $220,000.

The Pitchfork MARKET + Kitchen would fill 80 per cent of the space where Mountain Equipment Co-op was set to to open up a location, although plans for that store never materialized.

Back in 2018, Arbutus pitched City Council to redevelop the City yards downtown with plans that included a downtown grocery store. Those plans never came to fruition.

Pitchfork currently has one location up and running. The Meadows location in southeast Saskatoon opened up in 2021.

City Council has yet to finalize the road improvements for Idylwyld which were previously identified in the Imagine Idylwyld plan.

City Council will meet on Tuesday, May 24th.

(Photo courtesy of Google Maps)