by THOMAS BREEN The new haven independent
Yezenia Lebron succeeded in finding pork loin, bacalao, and Fiesta Campesina flower cookies at her go-to Grand Avenue grocery store — even as she struggled to get used to the supermarket’s new name above the door.
Lebron offered that food-focused perspective Monday while standing with a full shopping cart beside the automatic sliding doors of the newly renamed Key Food grocery store at 325 Ferry St.
Up until two weeks ago, that supermarket at the bustling Fair Haven intersection of Ferry Street and Grand Avenue was called C‑Town.
As of Feb. 22, the long-familiar sign there has been replaced by new large red letters reading: “Key Food.” Same goes for the now-ex-C-Town in the Kimberly Square section of the Hill at 482 Greenwich Ave.
The ex-C-Town at 482 Greenwich.
While the name has changed, much about the Ferry Street supermarket and the fellow C‑Town-turned-Key Food on Greenwich Avenue in the Hill will stay the same. That’s according to Kelvin Lopez, who is one of the co-owners of the two independently owned New Haven grocery store franchises.
He said the owners of both local grocery stores haven’t changed. (While Lopez is in New Haven, his business partners for both the Grand Avenue and Greenwich Avenue supermarkets are based in Florida.) He said both supermarkets will retain their staffs, roughly 60 full-time and part-time workers on Grand Avenue and another 35 at Greenwich.
And he said that the Kimberly Square market should still be moving ahead with expansion plans later this year, even as the owners have patched up damages caused by a recent car-into-grocery-store crash. (Both C‑Towns had been open for decades, with the Greenwich Avenue location opening in 2004 and the Ferry Street store having opened years before that.)
What has changed, Lopez said, is that the two New Haven supermarkets are now part of a larger network of independently owned grocery stores.
“They’re a bigger supplier than what C‑Town currently has,” Lopez said about Key Food. He said Key Food currently has “over 400 stores” across the country, while C‑Town has closer to 200. “We were running into too many hiccups with supplies,” he said. “The idea is to provide more varieties [of food] in the neighborhoods, and also lower pricing.”
Lopez was asked if the newly named Key Food stores will continue to stock foods that cater to Latin American cuisine in the way that the C‑Towns did.
“We’re going to keep” carrying those foods while also making the stores’ shelves “a little bit more diverse,” he respondrd.
Inside the Ferry Street supermarket Monday, store manager Herb Pellot agreed. “It’s a good change,” he said about the switchover from C‑Town to Key Food. “They have more merchandise.” There’s “no need for the customers to be worried.” It will be the “same nice people” working here. “The same clean store” to shop at.