Grocery executive Mariano is back
Bringing new downsized fresh market for Chicago
After running some of the largest grocery chains in Chicago, Bob Mariano is back and he is thinking small.
Mariano, a longtime Dominick’s executive who launched his namesake Mariano’s chain in 2010, is set to open Dom’s Kitchen & Market this summer in Lincoln Park. It is the first of what he hopes will be dozens of downsized neighborhood fresh markets catering to a new generation of Chicago grocery shoppers.
“If you look at what has happened in the years since we did Mariano’s, the customer has changed,” said Mariano, 71. “People are looking for easy, quick, fun, poised to go and get food.”
Located in a converted strip mall at 2730 N. Halsted St., Dom’s Kitchen & Market is scheduled to open in June with food stations and a dining area at its center, taking up a third of the 18,000-square-foot space. A typical grocery store is 60,000 to 70,000 square feet, with hospitality occupying only about 10% of the space.
Fresh produce, meats, a bakery and other grocery items will complement the prepared foods, but Dom’s Kitchen & Market will not be your weekly stock-up store, Mariano said.
“We’re not the laundry detergent, paper towels place,” Mariano said. “There’s enough outlets around trying to sell those products.”
Mariano, who stepped down as CEO of Roundy’s five years ago, is partnered in the new venture with Jay Owen, a great-grandson of Dominick’s founder Dominick DiMatteo, and Don Fitzgerald, a former executive at Dominick’s, Roundy’s and Mariano’s. Dom’s Kitchen & Market has raised $25 million in seed funding from a number of venture capital firms, including Chicago-based Cleveland Avenue, which is run by former McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson.
Dominick’s, once one of the largest grocery chains in Chicago, was shuttered by Safeway in 2013, with Mariano’s among the competitors
stepping in to fill the void. In 2015, supermarket giant Kroger bought Mariano’s parent company, Milwaukee-based Roundy’s, for $800 million. Mariano retired in 2016.
Mariano said the large supermarket formats he helped build may be increasingly obsolete in the post-pandemic world.
He points to Amazon’s $13.4 billion purchase of Whole Foods in 2017 as shifting the supermarket paradigm to delivery, a trend accelerated by the pandemic. The stock-up stuff, Mariano said, is tailormade for ordering online.
“More people over time will get the basics online,” Mariano said. “And so that business in terms of brickand-mortar retail will decline over time.”
Buying food to eat now, or take home and prepare, will make neighborhood fresh markets a growing niche, Mariano said. Dom’s Kitchen & Market will offer an app and curbside pickup from day one, but he expects it to be a gathering place where customers make multiple visits a week.
Mariano said he would like to see the stores dotting Chicago neighborhoods in the “not too distant future,” with the goal of opening a couple of dozen locations across the city. Longer term, the concept may expand to other markets, he said.
“We’re going to take that a step at a time,” Mariano said. “We’re not going to focus on other geographies right away. We’d like to get established here in the city and learn how the customer uses the store. When we did Mariano’s, we went to school for a year before we opened the second store.”