Giant Tiger Coming To Downtown Steinbach

Downtown Steinbach is getting a grocery store. Giant Tiger, which includes groceries as well has hard and soft goods, will be located in the Brookdale Mall. The 16,000 square foot building will undergo a multi-million dollar renovation and makeover before opening next spring.

Solomon Budala, who owns the mall together with his son Mark as well as Harry and Todd Peters, says this answers the calls for a downtown grocery outlet after he purchased the Extra Foods building.

"Two years ago, when I purchased the Extra Foods building from Loblaws, they requested that we not have a grocery store in that building for 40 years. That's a clause that I have in my agreement. Many seniors in this area were disappointed that a grocery store was not opening in the the Extra Foods building."

Budala says today's announcement should ease that disappointment.

Sklyar Berman, the manager of store development for Giant Tiger, says they've been eyeing the Steinbach market for 5-7 years and look forward to being here. He adds Mike Fast of Schinkel Properties, who brokered the deal, helped move the process forward.

"I can speak on behalf of Northwest Company that Mike and both landlords have worked with the utmost integrity and we have a ton of respect for them and we're really excited to kick off this partnership here today. The opening is tentatively scheduled for spring of 2018 so we've got some good work to do with Solomon and with Todd's group and we're excited to kickstart some of the plans for the building renovations as well."

Giant Tiger vice-president Glenn Revet says the store will employ between 25 and 35 people with most of those being full-time jobs. He outlines the types of merchandise they will carry.

"Typically our store is divided up into soft goods, hard goods and grocery, so really three main segments of our business equally represented as one-third of the store. So it'll provide that full shop, that full grocery assortment, especially in the downtown core, which I think is missing in Steinbach. We will have an assortment of produce, meat, a small amount of fresh baking and then obviously the dry grocery which includes dairy, deli and then the dry assortment throughout the grocery department."