Grocery Outlet opens in North Philadelphia, first business to open in new PHA development

After studying engineering at Morgan State University, Donta Rose went to work designing stores for Grocery Outlet, a California-based discount franchise rapidly expanding into the Philadelphia area.

He saw the list of future stores and noticed that one would open at 21st Street and Ridge Avenue in the Sharswood section of North Philadelphia.

“That’s where we’re from,” said Rose, 28, whose mother, Melanie, grew up on Woodstock Street. “I know the neighborhood. I know how unique this neighborhood is, because if you go four blocks over, you’re on Temple’s campus, and if you go five blocks down, you’re in Brewerytown. It became really important for me to be in a community that we’re familiar with.”

Rose scraped together savings and obtained what he called “a nice, hefty loan” to buy in. On July 26, he helped cut the ribbon of a $5 million Grocery Outlet store, one of the linchpins of a neighborhood’s revival. The store has a parking garage, but it will be a boon to residents who need to walk or rely on rides of more than a mile to shop for groceries, beyond corner stores and produce vendors.

Grocery Outlet is a full-line store with meats, dairy, frozen food, and produce. The groceries are all name brand. But the selection can be random, since the store’s buyers deal in manufacturer overstocks and closeouts. (You might see Cheerios in one size, for example, but no other varieties.)

Rose said the fresh food, delivered four days a week, is “the major thing for this neighborhood. As a kid, there was never any grocery stores where you would buy fresh produce nearby.”

Grocery Outlet, which has more than 400 stores nationwide, is providing support. And Rose is counting on help from his extended network of family and friends, including his sister Toni and friend Nafis Muhammad, who will manage the store, which has hired many of the 30-person staff from the neighborhood.

“While we want to be a successful business, we also want to be connected to the community,” said Melanie Rose, Donta Rose’s mother, a legal supervisor at American Water Works in South Jersey. “You know what’s going on in Philadelphia. You know how there’s so much crime and so much violence and so many people taking it out on each other instead of building within each other. That’s why we’re here — not to say, ‘We have a grocery store,’ but we want the community to know that we are from here.”

The Philadelphia Housing Authority, backed by federal money, has put enormous effort into reviving the adjacent Sharswood and Blumberg neighborhoods. First, the PHA took control of 1,300 parcels between 19th and 27th Streets, from Girard to Cecil B. Moore Avenues, to build hundreds of subsidized homes for Philadelphia’s poorest residents.

In addition to the Grocery Outlet, the development will include 98 apartments, an Everest Urgent-Care Center, a senior-care center, a Santander Bank, a Pagano’s Market, and a new location for Barkley’s BBQ, a restaurant now operating eight blocks away.

It’s a comprehensive neighborhood plan, said Leslie Smallwood-Lewis of Mosaic Development Partners, which is leading some of the development with Shift Capital. She is also a Rose family friend.

Smallwood-Lewis said they initially considered a deal with Save-A-Lot, which operates a store at a Mosaic-created development in the city’s Fairhill neighborhood. She said they reached out to Grocery Outlet because “we thought they had a unique and different approach and thought that this would be a great opportunity to bring something a little different to this neighborhood.”

What sold the developers, Smallwood-Lewis said, was Grocery Outlet’s “willingness to really search for a diverse owner-operator for the location. I’m thrilled by the fact that they really leaned in and were able to deliver on that.”

Their pick was Rose, who grew up mostly in Elkins Park and in Williamstown, a community in Gloucester County, N.J.

Entrepreneurship runs in his family, Rose said. At 9, he was busing tables at the old Littleton’s Diner in East Oak Lane, owned by his grandparents. His father, Anthony, is a Tastykake distributor and has other business interests.

“I’m not from this rich family that gave me this,” Rose said. “I worked hard.”

Rose has help in other ways. “My name is on the loan and my face might be on there [in store signage], but my mom is going to be with me,” he said recently as the store was being set up. “My dad is actually out running right now to go pick up a safe for me and helping to grab stuff for the opening. My sisters are with me. So it’s definitely going to be a family business, for sure.”