Business & Tech

Whole Foods Signs Lease for Beverly Plaza

Whole Foods in the first tenant to announce its plans to become part of the North Shore Commons shopping center on Brimbal Avenue.

Whole Foods, a high-end grocery store chain known for its organic food selection, announced Thursday it has signed a lease for a shopping plaza planned along Brimbal Avenue.

The store plans a 2016 opening, the company said.

The store is planned to be 35,000 square feet and will have about 150 employees, according to the Whole Foods announcement.

The announcement came as part of Whole Foods' latest earnings call, when it also announced plans for a store in downtown Portsmouth on the New Hampshire seacoast and in Shreveport, La., according to Whole Foods spokeswoman Robin Rehfield Kelly.

"We’ve been exploring locations in Beverly for some time now and we’ve received significant interest from local residents over the years, so we’re confident that both Beverly and (the Whole Foods location that opened in August in) Lynnfield will be well received and serve as great community partners," she said.

Whole Foods was founded in 1974 in Austin, Texas, and currently has 367 stores with 78,000 employees across the country. There are currently stores in Andover, Lynnfield and Swampscott.

For the past 16 years, Fortune magazine has named it one of the 100 best companies to work for.

Whole Foods made the announcement because the company signed a lease with developer CEA Group to become part of the planned North Shore Commons Shopping Center, Kelly said. Plaza owner CEA Group and its principal, Stephen Cohen, could not be reached for comment on Thursday.

CEA Group and Whole Foods has not yet filed an application for a specific project, according to Beverly Planning Director Tina Cassidy. There has been no application for either the land they currently own or on the parcel they hope to own after swapping neighboring land with the state government as part of a project to make road improvements in the area.

The swap went before a Legislative committee on Wednesday, according to a report in the Salem News, but no final decision was made. The rezoning of state-owned land, which was approved by the City Council last month, could go to a city-wide vote if residents gathered enough signatures by next week to put it to a vote.


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