The Story of Chicago’s Grocery Stores – And How They’ve Changed How We Eat

Get more recipes, food news, and stories at wttw.com/food or by signing up for our Deep Dish newsletter.

It’s been a tumultuous year for grocery stores. In February, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block a proposed $24.6 billion merger between the large national grocery chains Kroger and Albertsons, which operate Mariano’s and Jewel in the Chicago area, respectively. Two months later, the upscale grocery retailer Outfox Hospitality abruptly closed all 33 of its Foxtrot stores and two Dom’s Kitchen and Market locations in Chicago just months after a merger.

But despite the turmoil, it’s not all bad apples in the bushel: the South Asian grocery store Patel Brothers, which started in Chicago’s West Ridge neighborhood and now has 52 stores across the country, just celebrated its 50th anniversary.

National chains, venture capital-funded boutique marts, international stores supplying imported ingredients to immigrant populations – it’s all a far cry from the early days of Chicago groceries.

Chicago’s Early Food Markets

Back when the city was little more than a trading post located at the confluence of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan, the only things resembling grocery stores were drygoods or general stores. Customers could buy imported nonperishables like coffee, tea, sugar, spices, and dried items there, and sometimes enjoy a drink as well – Miller House, Chicago’s first tavern, was also a drygoods store, according to The Chicago Food Encyclopedia.

In 1839, the city council allowed the construction of Chicago’s first public market, providing both buyers and sellers a centralized place to trade foodstuffs. Located by today’s Chicago Theatre, around where the Green City Market started more than 150 years later, it also functioned similarly to a contemporary farmers market: customers visited the rented stalls of vendors to purchase produce, meat, eggs, and more. The lack of refrigeration meant all these goods had to be carted into the city and sold daily; people had to shop every day for food. Two more markets were soon added as the city grew.

With the city rapidly expanding, groceries also began to open on street corners or commercial strips in neighborhoods farther away from the public markets, allowing residents to walk to buy their daily necessities before heading to a nearby butcher for meat, baker for bread, maybe a fishmonger for seafood. The shopping experience at the groceries was the same as at the specialty stores; there was no self-service. A customer asked a clerk behind a counter for a list of goods. That employee then gathered such things as flour, cinnamon, dried fruit, and rice from bulk containers and weighed them out before wrapping them for the customer. Besides those drygoods, any perishable food was grown nearby – it had to be, without refrigeration or the extensive transportation network we have today.  

Some stores offered delivery by bicycle, while milk came directly to your door in the morning. As the nineteenth century progressed, blocks of ice that had been harvested over winter from a lake or stream and then stored in an icehouse might also be delivered daily, to be inserted into a heavy, insulated ice chest that worked as an early refrigerator.

The Rise of Chain Grocery Stores and Supermarkets

Chain grocery stores began opening in Chicago as early as the 1870s, when an outpost of A&P arrived soon after The Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Chicago-based National Tea Company and Jewel Tea Company eventually followed. As their names suggest, these companies still focused primarily on drygoods. (“A&P” was a shortening of “Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company.”)

But they still provided competition to the small local grocers in their ability to buy goods in bulk for multiple stores and to blanket newspapers with advertising. (The chain Piggly Wiggly was the single largest newspaper advertiser in the U.S. during the 1920s.) So some grocers joined co-operative groups like the Independent Grocers Alliance (IGA) or the Joliet-founded Central Grocers, which allowed them to remain individual owners but band together to match the chains in advertising and bulk purchasing.

Neither the chains nor groups like IGA had established their own distribution systems for goods yet. During the first part of the twentieth century, they still generally bought produce from the markets located centrally near rail lines on the Near West Side, which were supplied by nearby farms. A market on South Water Street was the second biggest wholesale produce market in the country by 1949. Randolph Street and Fulton Market in what is now known as the West Loop also housed wholesale markets, the latter for meat and animal products from the Union Stockyards. Randolph in that area is wider than most streets to accommodate the traffic of a market; in this century, it and Fulton Market have retained a food focus, shifting to house some of the city’s most acclaimed restaurants as the wholesale markets have disappeared. (There is still a Chicago International Produce Market on the Lower West Side, from which many independent grocery stores in the area buy their produce.)

The chains grew quickly – and also started to introduce innovations that not only changed grocery stores but also the American diet. By 1933, chains accounted for only 20 percent of grocery stores in the Chicago area but 60 percent of grocery sales, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago.

Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly in Memphis, Tennessee in 1916; by 1922, there were more than a thousand across the country, including in Chicago. Saunders introduced self-service to the grocery store. To save money on clerks, he replaced the counters behind which employees packaged goods for customers with aisles for the customer to peruse and grab their own goods.

Self-service was a seismic shift. Along with the introduction of mechanical refrigeration, it enabled the rise of national food brands serving prepackaged, often processed foods – which began to replace fresh produce in the American diet. The French chef Jacques Pépin recalls arriving in America in 1959 and finding only canned mushrooms at the grocery store.

The development of refrigerated trucking and an interstate highway system after World War II encouraged the trend toward nationalization of both food brands and grocery store chains. The latter were now able to build their own distribution systems exclusively for their stores, thus bypassing the wholesale markets and keeping their costs down. But it necessitated the sale of large quantities of product in order to make a profit and justify the bulk purchasing, which also led to more food waste. (“The average store throws out five to ten thousand dollars’ worth of food every day,” says the CEO of Flashfood, an app that tries to mitigate some of that waste.) Later, big chains would also introduce their own generic brands. The establishment of in-house distribution chains both required and facilitated further growth, which put more pressure on small, independent grocers.

The growth of the supermarket after World War II extended that competition beyond grocers to specialty stores. Back in the 1920s, after losing control of Piggly Wiggly and going bankrupt, Clarence Saunders devised a new idea: adding in a staffed meat and bakery counter to his self-service grocery store. (His foresight continued when he later tried and failed to develop a fully automated store.) This, too, eventually failed him when the Depression closed his new venture – but the idea bore fruit in the postwar era.

Suburbanization and the rise of car ownership allowed for the creation of giant, standalone retail locations that served as one-stop shops, while home refrigerators let customers buy in larger quantities and thus shop for food less frequently. Shoppers no longer had to walk to their grocer, butcher, and baker every day; they could now drive to a single store, park in its massive parking lot, and find everything under one roof.

Chicago Grocery Stores

The Sicilian-born Dominick DiMatteo opened his first store on the West Side in 1918, but his business took off after he opened his first supermarket, called Dominick’s Finer Foods, in 1950. His son led an expansion over the 1980s, particularly in the suburbs, and began adding even more “stores” to his supermarkets: florists, liquor stores, pharmacies, banks, cosmetic departments, photo developers, and even dry cleaners in some locations. Some supermarkets started to offer prepared food and in-store dining, taking over from restaurants. The small businesses of a self-sufficient neighborhood had all moved into one space, under a single corporate owner.

By 1987, there were only 3,638 food retailers in the Chicago area when there had been over 17,000 in 1933.

Jewel followed a similar trajectory. It started in 1899 as a horse-drawn door-to-door delivery company but began opening stores in the 1930s and had 100 outposts by 1936. It was among the ten largest retail grocery chains in the country by the end of World War II. It purchased Osco Pharmacies in the 1960s, and combined that business with its grocery stores under one roof in the 1980s. A Salt Lake City company led a hostile takeover of Jewel in 1984; that company was in turn bought by Boise-based Albertsons in 1999.

Dominick’s also went through several owners, ending up with Safeway in 1998. Five years later, they closed 20 stores. Ten years after that, they closed the remaining 72 Dominick’s locations and shuttered the brand. Many of the large, purpose-built stores were taken over by other chains such as Caputo’s, Pete’s, and an upstart called Mariano’s that had been started in 2010 by a former president and CEO of Dominick’s, Bob Mariano.

Mariano’s only stayed local for five years, before Kroger purchased its Milwaukee-based parent company Roundy’s. (Bob Mariano later founded Dom’s Kitchen and Market with a grandson of Dominick DiMatteo and a former executive of Dominick’s and Mariano’s.) It thus became another of the national chains that arrived in the Chicago area in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century: Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Woodman’s, Meijer. Safeway, Dominick’s one-time owner, is now a subsidiary of Cincinnati-based Albertsons, which owns Jewel. If the merger between Kroger and Albertsons goes through, the combined company will control around thirteen percent of the U.S. grocery market even after selling off 413 stores to assuage concerns of a monopoly.

That market share pales before the behemoth of Walmart, which has around 22% of the market. Indeed, Kroger and Albertsons cite the competition of Walmart, Costco, and Amazon-owned Whole Foods as necessitating their merger.

Despite the enormous reach of these companies, there are still significant gaps in rural areas and cities like Chicago, where residents don’t have easy access to a grocery store carrying a wide array of fresh food – food deserts. Whole Foods touted a store in Englewood on the South Side but closed it within six years. ALDI closed a West Garfield Park store in 2021, and Save a Lot in Austin closed in 2020. Stores that continue to serve these neighborhoods are often criticized by residents for their limited options, lack of fresh ingredients, and poor reputation.

Profit margins for grocery stores are narrow; the Food Industry Association found them to be at just 1.6% for food retailers in 2023. Even the chains face pressure from Walmart and dollar stores. But there are still local retailers servicing their communities, for instance Austin’s ambitious, planned Forty Acres Fresh Market. There are numerous independent one-offs or small groups in the Chicago area, from Sunset Foods in the northern suburbs to County Fair Foods on the far Southwest Side. Many other slightly larger chains were founded starting in the ’60s: Butera Market; Tony’s Fresh Market; Pete’s Fresh Market, which originated as a produce stand; and Cermak Fresh Market, which was founded by Greek immigrants. South American groceries and carnicerias have proliferated, as have Asian grocery stores of all varieties: small and local (Joong Boo Market), big and local (Patel Brothers), national (H Mart), and international (Seafood City).

But grocery stores of all sizes face a difficult environment despite their necessity, as evidenced by the closure of Treasure Island Foods’ seven locations in 2018 after 55 years in business. A retail space in Uptown quickly went through two separate plant-based grocery stores before a vegan food hall took over and has finally lasted – for a year, at least. Cooperatively owned stores beholden to the community offer an alternative model, but one that struggles to gain traction or survive; Chicago has only two, Logan Square’s Dill Pickle and Rogers Park’s new Wild Onion Market. Farmers markets supplement with fresh produce in the warmer months (and some through winter), but can only provide a small portion of the food necessary to feed a city of nearly three million people.

Despite the obstacles, entrepreneurs like Liz Abunaw of Forty Acres Fresh Market are still trying to succeed and provide a basic need for their communities in the form of a well-stocked local grocery store, as she explained. “It’s this community hub, where you do the business of buying your food, you see your neighbors, you enjoy what your neighborhood has to offer.”