Whole Foods Signs 10K-SF Lease for Bodega-Like Grocery Store in Bushwick

Whole Foods has selected Brooklyn’s bustling Bushwick neighborhood as the next potential location for its bodega-like market concept.

The grocery chain owned by Amazon signed a 15-year, 10,000-square-foot lease at 1224 Flushing Avenue, a property owned by David Moore that is near the Jefferson Avenue L train stop, according to a memorandum of lease filing made public last week.

The deal followed the news earlier last week that the retailer had also signed a 35,000-square-foot lease at 182 Smith Street in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn. Both leases are for the store’s new small-format store concept, which began in Chelsea in 2019.

Asking rent for the space was $130 per square foot, according to a source with knowledge of the deal.

The new store announcements also come after a bit of a switch-up in retail footprint strategies for Amazon.

In January, Amazon announced it would close all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores in favor of focusing on an expansion of the small-format Whole Foods brand, specifically with the Whole Foods Market Daily Shop concept, which focuses on online orders similar to Trader Joe’s Pronto.

Manu Wendum and Marisa Simkin of Retail by MONA were marketing the building for lease, but did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Amazon and Moore also did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Crain’s New York Business first reported the new Whole Foods leases.

The bodega-like concept is also one that has been on a slow rise since Amazon opened its first one at 250 Seventh Avenue in Chelsea in 2019. More recently, Whole Foods signed a deal for a 7,888-square-foot mini store at 774 Grand Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Mark Hallum can be reached at mhallum@commercialobserver.com.