Foodland Super Market Ltd. has signed a lease with General Growth Properties calling for it to pay $24.3 million over an initial 20-year term for what will be its largest store in Hawaii — a 47,395-square-foot Foodland Farms store at Ala Moana Center.

The lease, which is scheduled to expire on June 30, 2036, with extensions for four successive periods of five years each, is for Foodland Farms’ new flagship store that will include The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, R. Field Wine Co., a Foodland Pharmacy and an in-store bank.

The old 18,500-square-foot Foodland grocery store on the street level of the mall — one of Ala Moana Center’s original tenants when it first opened in 1959 — closed in 2014 after company executives decided to not renew their lease for the space.

Honolulu general contractor Albert C. Kobayashi Inc. has started construction on the new store, which is located beneath the 185,000-square-foot newly-repositioned Nordstrom department store that recently opened in the mall’s Ewa Wing on Piikoi Street. It is scheduled to open later this year.

The new store will be more than twice as large as its original location, near the Ala Moana Center post office, and be the largest Foodland location in the state.

The store is part of mall majority owner General Growth Properties Inc.’s $573 million expansion project to redevelop a former Sears department store into an expanded three-level retail area with 650,000-square-feet of new retailers, including a 167,000-square-foot Bloomingdale’s department store.

Pacific Business News
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