Grand Mart
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Grand Mart International Food is a Korean supermarket chain primarily based in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, with locations in North Carolina, Georgia, and Illinois. It is owned by Annandale, Virginia-based Man Min Corporation, a family company. It was founded in 2002 by David Min Sik Kang, a Korean-American entrepreneur who originally owned small Korean grocery stores in Washington, D.C..
Grand Mart provides a wide selection of Korean and East Asian groceries. Depending on the location of the store, it also offers varying amounts of South Asian, Latino, and traditional American groceries, particularly in areas with relatively low populations of ethnic Koreans, hence the name "International Food." Some stores advertise in the Spanish language media as "Mercado Grande," and have signs in English, Spanish and Korean. Nevertheless, all Grand Mart supermarkets retain a strong Korean flavor, which include in-store Korean bakeries and video rental shops which rent out DVDs of television shows from South Korea.
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[edit] Locations
Grand Mart has stores in Virginia, Maryland, Washington, D.C., North Carolina, and Georgia, most of which are targeted primarily toward the Korean American community which is concentrated heavily in Fairfax and Montgomery Counties. All locations have been very successful. The newest store in the Washington area opened in Sterling in eastern Loudoun County in 2006, which not only was the first Korean supermarket in Loudoun County, but also the first in a part of the Washington area without many Korean Americans.
Grand Mart is also expanding outside of the Baltimore-Washington area including more locations in Georgia and North Carolina, as well as planned stores in Texas and New York. In the Chicago market it has purchased eight former Cub Foods locations — two closed in June 2006, the other six during December 2006 — from Cerberus Capital Management. These locations were formerly owned and operated by Supervalu, which has divested itself of all the Cub Foods in Chicagoland to Cerberus to avoid any anti-trust issues related to its purchase of Jewel-Osco from Albertsons.
[edit] Washington, D.C.
[edit] Georgia
[edit] Illinois
- Aurora (Opening early 2007)
- Bedford Park (Opening November 2006)
- Bridgeview (Opening early 2007)
- Chicago, at North and Cicero Avenues (Opened February 15, 2007)
- Joliet (Opening early 2007)
- Melrose Park (Opened February 2, 2007)
- Naperville (Opening November 2006)
- Niles (Opened March 8, 2007)
[edit] Maryland
- Baltimore, located in Security Square Mall
- Gaithersburg
- Germantown (Currently closed due to fire)
[edit] North Carolina
[edit] Virginia
- Alexandria
- Centreville
- Targets East Asian, Southeast Asian, and Latino customers
- Falls Church
- Targets considerably to Southeast Asians and Latinos as well as Koreans
- Sterling
- Targets Latinos, South Asians, and Southeast Asians; first D.C.-area Grand Mart to open in an place without a large Korean population nearby
