As Trader Joe’s prepares to open a store in West Palm Beach’s South End, a neighboring shopping plaza is looking to bring a rival grocer to a site just up the road.
The owner of the Palm Coast Plaza along South Dixie Highway has submitted city paperwork to start the process of bringing an Aldi grocery store to the site.
The move by the plaza, which already contains a Winn-Dixie supermarket, means the South End could soon have three grocers within a short walk of each other.
Meanwhile, a fourth grocery, Presidente Supermarket, sits just across the canal that separates West Palm Beach from Lake Worth Beach.
The proposed Aldi store would sit along Dixie in what is now a parking lot just south of a Pollo Tropical restaurant, according to a conceptual plan submitted to the city by the plaza’s owner.
The pre-application for the “proposed development of an Aldi grocery store” calls for “a single-tenant retail building with parking, circulation, landscaping, and supporting infrastructure” at 7915 S. Dixie Highway, city records show.
The pre-application to bring the popular discount grocer was considered May 14 by the city’s Plans and Plats Review Committee.
The shopping plaza, said to be the second-oldest in Palm Beach County, is owned by Johnstone Capital Partners, the firm that developed the city’s warehouse district southwest of downtown and the Industrial Alley complex along Belvedere Road near the Flamingo Park neighborhood.
The company is tight-lipped for now about its plans at the Palm Coast Plaza, with a representative declining to comment this week.
The company bought it in 2022 for $25 million and moved the following year for a land-use change to allow future residential development on the property. A planner for the developer at the time called it “the first step in setting the parcel up for future redevelopment.”
The news of a potential Aldi store comes as Trader Joe’s readies its South End store for a widely anticipated opening. An opening date has not been announced but is expected in upcoming months.
Trader Joe’s will be the anchor tenant at an eight-story apartment-and-retail complex under construction at 8111 S. Dixie Highway, on the city’s border with Lake Worth Beach.
Though they compete as discount grocers, Aldi and Trader Joe’s are sister companies, with both chains owned by German companies founded by the Albrecht family.
Andrew Marra is a reporter with The Palm Beach Post. Reach him at amarra@pbpost.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Grocery wars in West Palm? Aldi could be coming to city’s South End
Reporting by Andrew Marra, Palm Beach Post / Palm Beach Post
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