Opening of The Fresh Market in northeast Richland delayed until 2017

The opening of The Fresh Market on Two Notch Road has been delayed until early 2017, a local developer said Friday, as the specialty grocery store’s new owners review new store plans.

In March, Apollo Group Management, a New York-based private equity firm, purchased The Fresh Market, a 30-year-old specialty grocer based in North Carolina, for $1.4 billion.

Last November, Collier’s International announced it had brokered a deal for the gourmet grocer to anchor a new 36,500-square-foot shopping center on a 3-acre site at Two Notch Road and Fore Avenue, across from the entrance to the Village at Sandhill shopping and residential complex northeast of Columbia.

The Fresh Market, which has a store in Trenholm Plaza, planned last November to open its Two Notch Road location by late summer or early fall this year. Lexington town officials have said plans have been filed to build a Fresh Market in their town on U.S. 378.

“They bought The Fresh Market, and when they did that, they wanted to re-work the interior layout of all their new stores, so that’s what the delay has been thus far,” said Tripp Bradley, a Collier’s International senior brokerage associate in Columbia.

Bradley, who brokered the deal for the Fresh Market shopping center that is being developed by Greenville-based MPG Two Notch LLC, said he thinks the new projected time frame for the store opening is January or February.

Apollo Management Group referred questions about the new store to The Fresh Market’s real estate group, which could not be reached on Friday.

Fresh Market will occupy a 22,500-square-foot building along the back of the site at Two Notch Road, where a Pet Supermarket is slated to open in the 14,000 square feet of space left there. In the front portion of the shopping center, a pizza restaurant and Zoe’s Kitchen are signed on.

Collier’s is finalizing a lease with the final tenant slated to open in the building at the front of the shopping center, Bradley said. It will be occupied by a tenant new to the Columbia market, but the tenant’s identity could not be disclosed yet, Bradley said.

This story was originally published September 23, 2016 at 5:48 PM.