Foxtrot to reopen River North location on Thursday

Foxtrot Café & Market will reopen its River North store in Chicago on Thursday.

The convenience-store chain's fifth location is at 401 N Wells St.

The urban convenience-store chain closed all of its stores in the spring. It has since reopened stores in Gold Coast, in Old Town, Wicker Park and Fulton Market.

“The chance to come back in, rebuild the team and rebuild all those partnerships with all these small and local vendors, which was really the whole impetus of founding the company, has been exciting,” Mike LaVitola, founder of Foxtrot, recently told CSP. “It's nice to be so close to everything again and to see the stores full of people enjoying what we found.”

The leadership team is about 80-90% smaller, LaVitola said. 

“The strategy is really clear, what's important is really clear, and there's a high degree of trust between all of us," he said. "We are together once a week, and besides that, we're in stores all week.”

The new Foxtrot has “simplified its operations,” LaVitola told CSP in September, going back to how it operated three or four years ago. The company ran with about 2,500 SKUs at first, which grew to about 5,000, he said. 

“It was very unsustainable, and I think that led to a lot of the problems,” he said. 

Now, the chain is focusing on small vendors as its first priority, he said. It currently has about 100 total vendors, and when it comes to individual brands, a couple hundred, he added. Foxtrot is also continuing its private label. 

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To celebrate the grand opening, the café will offer free drip coffee on Thursday from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., with no purchase necessary, plus a free Barbet sparkling water with any purchase on Friday, while supplies last. Additionally, Foxtrot will host happy hours on Friday and Saturday from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., featuring $4 draft pours and $7 wine pours.

Foxtrot had 33 convenience stores in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Dallas and Austin, Texas, as well as two Dom’s Kitchen & Market small-format grocery locations in Chicago. The company closed all of its stores on April 23 with no notice to its employees. The move came less than six months after the two brands merged and formed a new entity, Outfox Hospitality.

Foxtrot's assets were sold to holding company Further Point Enterprises at an online auction in May for approximately $2.2 million. Days later, Outfox Hospitality filed for bankruptcy.

Some laid-off employees had filed a lawsuit against Foxtrot in April following the store closures. Block Club Chicago reported Foxtrot’s vendors faced unpaid bills and stranded products after the stores shut down.

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Further Point approached Mike LaVitola, the original Foxtrot founder, to return to help run a revival of Foxtrot.

Foxtrot was founded in 2014 as a delivery company selling snacks, beer and wine, and grew into a corner store-restaurant hybrid that featured high-end package goods, prepared foods, coffee bars and wine bars. The chain, once billed as the “convenience store of the future,” raised more than $160 million to fuel its growth over its lifetime.

This story was originally featured on CSP Daily News, a sister publication of Supermarket News.