IKEA’s once-empty mall now nearly full
Saluhall, the plant-forward food hall that opened Thursday, is the latest addition to the nearly full IKEA-anchored retail center on San Francisco’s Market Street.
It’s a notable turnaround for what was a completely vacant mall known as 6x6 that IKEA sister company Ingka Centre bought in 2020, months after the pandemic forced businesses and offices to close. Despite continuing uncertainty around the area’s future economic vitality, including the closure last year of the nearby Nordstrom, IKEA and Ingka saw an opportunity for a new type of mixeduse retail concept.
“Coming here, we saw a completely empty building and an opportunity to create something unique. It was an opportunity to not only have an IKEA store close to the many people here in San Francisco, in an iconic district on Market Street, but also to have a place where we could develop our own content from the start,” said Cindy Anderson, managing director at Netherlandsbased Ingka Centres. “We really hope and dream that it will give something positive to San Francisco.”
The small-format IKEA store spanning 87,000 square feet of the larger mall opened its doors last summer, and Hej! Workshop, a 46,000-square-foot co-working space operated by flexible space provider Industrious, opened on the fifth floor in January. This retail and office space combination so far only exists in two Ingka Centres locations — so-called “meeting places” — in Europe, according to Anderson.
Saluhall represents the third piece in the San Francisco mall’s long-awaited activation. Spanning 23,000 square feet across two levels, the Scandinavian-style food hall operated by KERB has capacity to seat 450 people and features a cooking school developed with renowned Danish chef and entrepreneur Claus Meyer, three bars, five local independent food vendors, an inhouse bakery restaurant, vegan burger bar and softserve station.
“Saluhall sets the mark on how we would like to see the food offerings going forward in other meeting places,” Anderson said.
But the puzzle is not complete. Ingka is in active conversations around filling two floors — the third and fourth — that remain vacant in the building, potentially with retail and entertainment-focused uses.
While Saluhall is set up to operate independently from the adjacent IKEA store, two entrances on both levels of the food hall allow shoppers to flow between the mall’s various components with ease.
“Seeing the totality of the concepts come together, we are now starting to really manifest what this place could be,” said Anderson, adding that a few years ago, Ingka Centres rebranded from a shopping center business to a “meeting place business” in response to changing consumer trends.
“With digitalization, people were not choosing to go to destinations where they didn’t also get experiences,” she said. “For us, this meant bringing in a live-work-play-shop concept — it’s no longer enough to just offer a space. You have to offer relevance for people. And this place brings all of those components together.”
The mall’s opening comes amid a wave of retail closures in downtown San Francisco — more than 30 have exited their locations since the start of the pandemic. Consumer shopping habits have trended toward online purchases in recent years, and more than one-third of downtown’s offices sit empty in 2024 as a result of remote work.
But Anderson said that Ingka has seen evidence of “pent-up demand” from consumers after the pandemic.
“We are back to 2019 numbers in many of our meeting places,” she said. “Last year, we saw a higher visitation globally than the year before. This is not the time to lean back — it’s time to lean forward and create those experiences, convenience and services that people want.”
IKEA didn’t disclose information on sales in the 945 Market St. location. Overall, its parent company reported fiscal 2023 annual sales of 47.6 billion euros ($51 billion), up 6.6% from the previous fiscal year. More than 70 sales locations opened, with many smaller-format stores.
IKEA and Ingka are now looking at more opportunities to create meeting places throughout the United States.
“Now that we have this amazing place, we would like to have more,” Anderson said. “We are looking primarily at big cities, here and in Europe. We like the thought that we can go in, acquire existing buildings and repurpose them. In many ways, that means that you are already part of the community.”