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 and fresh produce. Depending on the location of the store, it also offers varying amounts of Asian, Latino, African and traditional North American groceries. 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 purchased eight former Cub Foods locations. However, the Grand Mart format was not successful in the Chicago area, and the 4 stores that were opened subsequently closed.[1]
[edit] Washington, D.C.
[edit] Georgia
[edit] Atlanta Metro Area
[edit] Maryland
- Gaithersburg
- Germantown (re-opened after the fire)
[edit] North Carolina
[edit] Virginia
- Alexandria
- Centreville
- Falls Church
- Sterling (first D.C.-area Grand Mart to open in a place without a large Korean population nearby)
[edit] References
- ^ "Wrong ethnic mix nixes chain here", Chicago Sun Times, September 4, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-09-04.
A reference to the Niles Grand Mart closing is in "Korean grocer eyes February opening", Niles Herald-Spectator, January 31, 2008.
