New grocery store to open in 2025
October 21, 2024, 9:44 am
Ashley Bochek
Borderland Co-op has been working on a new 30,000-square-foot grocery store in Moosomin since November of 2023 and is planning to have the new building open in 2025.
Borderland Co-op GM, Jason Schenn, says they plan to be open in the new year.
“The opening date is still a moving target, but from a substantial completion standpoint, we have targeted the end of February for substantial completion,” he said.
“Depending on how things go, if we can get in a little bit earlier then to start doing some of our setup alongside the finishing work that CCR will be doing, that will all set the stage as to how fast we can get to opening.”
What will the transition look like from the old building to the new?
“We will basically close down business in the old store one day and open business up in the new one the next day, then we will have a whole transition team moving product into this building. There will be a constant stream for a week or so until we empty the old store and then we will auction off the equipment and start demolition.”
Schenn says the new building will employ more people from the surrounding area.
“We are probably going to have around 60 employees in the new building. The management group we have got established now—all of them are now working for us and on site, so they’re getting up to speed with things over there and then we will start breaking a few of them out to the transition team probably within the next month or two. Then, operations will just continue there until they can start getting in here and setting up their spaces. Front line support, that will be more of a moving target in the new year.”
Next steps
What are the next steps going forward from now until opening day for the new building?
“Right now, it is mostly mechanical and refrigeration that we are working on,” says Schenn. “There are a lot of guys that are working on different refrigeration things. Drywall is the next big step and they’re well ahead of it. Wall-Eye does great work in the area, they’re always quick and high quality.”
Schenn says the construction process has been going smoothly for the new Borderland grocery store in Moosomin.
“It has been going pretty well. As you go and dig things up, you always find yourself little surprises. We found a lot of horseshoes actually. I am not sure if there was a livery barn here or in the neighbourhood at some point in history, but when they were digging the foundation, we found about a dozen old horseshoes.”
Plans for old building
Borderland plans to host an auction for left over equipment out of the old grocery store.
“The transition plan right now is—as soon as we can move things over, we will have an auction date set up that coincides with that, so as soon as we are out of there, maybe within a week we will get to an auction and get all of the old shelving, or any old equipment out of the way and then immediately start the demolition,” Schenn said. “Of course, an old building like this, there are a little bit of expenses to deal with in some areas, so that is going to take some careful planning before they can bring in track hoes and things like that and start breaking it down.”
The new grocery store will continue to have the same hours for shoppers.
“We will have at least the same hours in the new building and we are looking at expanding those hours if the need is there,” Schenn said. “If we have the people, we will expand the hours.”
Excited to be part of big project
Schenn says he is very excited to be part of such a big project for Borderland.
“I am very excited,” Schenn says. “This is by far the biggest project we have taken on since I have been here. It is one of those generational projects that we hope is going to last a long time. This one is hopefully going to have a lot of positive impact on our branch locations as well.
“People aren’t relocating to smaller communities, we are finding that a real difficulty, but we have better odds of getting them here, especially if you have a good place for them to work. That is the idea that if we can’t get the recruitment in our smaller locations for some of the specialized things like meatcutting, then we have the ability here to essentially produce things that they can’t do. Any of the bigger trays, incorporating more deli product, fresh baked bread, or a wider variety of things some smaller sites may not be able to produce—and so we are able to produce essentially for locations who don’t have meat cutters or things like that on site.”
Local contractors
Schenn says they have local contractors working on the new build.
“Tag’s is working on mechanical, they are coming out of Esterhazy, Tom’s Electric is doing the electrical, Wall-Eye is doing all of our interiors, GeeBee out of Kipling are doing the ground work which is local to us as they’re part of Borderland’s area, CCR is our general contract here—they also worked with us on our Dairy Queen project in Whitewood last year and they did a fantastic job on that one, and a lot of the specialized jobs come out of urban areas. As much as we can keep local stream, we certainly do.”
New Borderland C-store in Kipling
Schenn says Borderland just finished a project in Kipling.
“In Kipling, it worked great working as our own general contractor. We are up and running there now, we have one week under our belt and things are looking good. The big thing for that is it was able to save us a lot of cost by keeping a lot of the things internal. We were able to keep the materials internal to us where everything we designed in that building was able to come from our own home centres which was a huge help, and then having a guy like Travis Holmstrom on staff that can be the project manager for it helps a lot.
“We haven’t crunched all the numbers yet, but I am thinking we are going to be in the neighbourhood of $700,000 under budget on that project which is phenomenal. In this day and age, you never see a project that comes in on time and under budget. It is hard to do that.”
New build may be under budget
Schenn says Borderland is excited that the new grocery store may come in under budget as well. “The budget was about $18.3 million, but we are tracking under that, so we are excited to hopefully be coming in under budget.
“When you talk about rural projects, cost is everything because we are held to the same standards as every other place in Canada, but have a smaller market to deal with, so you have to cut down the cost of construction as much as you can to make these things viable which is why we approached this project and our Kipling project in the way we did, because we are trying to prove a point here that you can build some high quality projects in rural communities and they can be successful if we can get away from some of the surplus costs.
“So, having Travis and our group internally that is reviewing this stuff makes it work a lot better and hopefully we can pull close to a million dollars in savings out of this project by the time all is said and done, and for us as a co-operative that is important. We need to be able to save whatever we can in those situations so we can provide that value to our members.”
Jason Bien of CCR, contractors for the new Borderland grocery store, says they are working on refrigeration and dry wall. “The refrigerators are just starting to arrive this week and then we also have our fire protection company that showed up this week along with all of the other trades doing their stuff. It has been a busy week this week.
“The walk-in boxes (refrigerators) will take about two weeks to install and that will be complete with all the condensers and piping,” he said.
“Then, we will start looking at more finishing stages after the refrigeration. There will be more drywall happening, mudding, taping, then finishing individual rooms like tiles in the bathrooms and kitchen, stuff like that. We will transition more from a rough stage to a finishing stage.”
Bien says he is confident they will meet their timeline for 2025.
“I am pretty confident we will meet all of our timelines. We met with Borderland last week and established a substantial completion date, so that is the drop-dead date that we need to meet.”
