Metcalfe’s Market, a family-owned grocery retailer for 107 years, is being sold to a Michigan-based grocery wholesale and retail company. But Brat Fest will continue and the store still plans to be locally focused.
SpartanNash, with 17,000 employees, a wholesale food business and 144 grocery stores, said Monday it planned to purchase Metfcalfe’s, which has two Madison stores and another in the Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa. The sale is expected to close this spring with Metcalfe’s branding and its employees remaining in place.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed but the change will help Metcalfe’s better manage its stores and offer more product lines, and could mean more Metcalfe locations in the future, said President Tim Metcalfe, who owns the store with his younger brother, Kevin, who handles operations. Both will remain with the company, along with Amanda Metcalfe, Tim’s daughter, who is in charge of human resources.
People are also reading…
“It’s a challenging business in a sea of larger businesses,” Tim Metcalfe said Monday. “We need to be good, and Metcalfe’s is very good, but having support for all ends of our business in technology and HR to compete and go to markets the way we have, we need the strength of a deeper bench. And that’s really what SpartanNash brings to us.”
The Metcalfes trumpet their hot food bars, in-house sushi, an expansive deli, fresh produce, meat and baked goods. The company’s stores also are known for their cheese departments and for identifying products made in Wisconsin with signs that say how far from the store the food originated. Metcalfe’s also was an early leader in grocery delivery, starting its service in 2001, years before it became the norm for other grocery retailers.
The company also founded Brat Fest, which started with Tim and Kevin’s father, Tom Metcalfe, cooking on a couple of grills in the Hilldale parking lot in 1983. It is now a sprawling festival at Alliant Energy Center with music, rides and thousands of attendees. Despite the sale of the company, Brat Fest will continue, this year running from May 24-26. The event has sold more than 4 million brats and has raised more than $2 million for more than 100 local charities.
“Metcalfe’s, along with all of our community partners, will continue to run and support Brat Fest into the future,” Tim Metcalfe said.
Modest beginnings
Henry and Teresa Hess, the great-grandparents of current owners Tim and Kevin Metcalfe, founded the grocery operation in 1917 with a modest store in Butler, northwest of Milwaukee. Over time, the enterprise expanded, and in 1969 the family bought a store in Monona. In 1979, it closed the Monona store and moved to Hilldale. The company opened a store in Wauwatosa in 2003 and in 2013 spent $3 million to open a 67,000-square-foot store in the former Cub Foods space at West Towne Mall in Madison.
Tom Metcalfe served as mayor of Monona from 1993 to 2003, expanding the city’s library, buying extra park space and redeveloping several areas of the city, including the Broadway corridor. He died in 2006 from kidney cancer at the age of 70.
“He was my mentor and a great example of what it means to be a business leader,” Tim Metcalfe told the Wisconsin State Journal shortly after his father had passed.
SpartanNash, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange and operates stores in nine Midwest states with its wholesale business distributing food to more than 2,100 retailers. It also owns the Fresh Madison Market at 703 University Ave., near the UW-Madison campus, along with two Family Fare grocery stores in Chippewa Falls near Eau Claire and a Family Fresh Market in River Falls in western Wisconsin.
Other stores owned by the company include Martin’s Super Markets, D&W Fresh Market, Forest Hills Foods and Supermercado Nuestra Familia, which serves Latino families in Iowa and Nebraska.
“Metcalfe’s Market has been a successful family-owned and operated business for four generations, and we are honored that the Metcalfe family is entrusting SpartanNash to build upon their legacy and bring new offerings to its team members and grocery shoppers,” SpartanNash CEO Tony Sarsam said. “As a people first company, we welcome Tim, Kevin and the entire Metcalfe’s Market team into the SpartanNash family, and we look forward to earning the loyalty of our newest store guests.”
Competitive market
The Madison area has long been considered one of the most competitive grocery markets in the Midwest thanks to a mix of stores that range from three Woodman’s Markets, three Willy Street Co-op stores and several Metro Market and Pick ’n Save, Hy-Vee, Festival Foods and Aldi stores. In addition, some Target and Walmart stores also offer full grocery lines, adding to the mix of competition.
Monroe Street hosts a Trader Joe’s while Whole Foods recently moved out of its longtime location on University Avenue to a new store in Madison Yards.
The former Whole Foods space is now Fresh Mart Madison, locally owned by Yashar Tairov, who also has a store in Sun Prairie that opened in 2020. Tairov, with his spouse Saniya Tairova, also runs the Istanbul Supermarket and Café at 745 S. Gammon Road, a grocery store that specializes in Turkish and Middle Eastern foods.
There are smaller independent grocers like Jennifer Street Market and Regent Market Co-op and scores of ethnic grocery stores throughout Dane County. Miller & Son’s has been a staple of downtown Verona since 1902 and expanded into Mount Horeb in 2009 with the purchase of Kalscheur’s Fine Foods. It abandoned that site to build a 44,000-square-foot store on Mount Horeb’s east side in 2013.
But over the last 107 years, the Metcalfes, like the Millers, have come to epitomize what it means to be a family grocery business.
“In so many communities around Wisconsin, people like the Metcalfes help move their communities forward,” said Michael Semman, who was recently named president and CEO of the Wisconsin Grocers Association. “So to hear of the partnership that the Metcalfes are going to be around, from an industry perspective, lifts the entire industry up. The Metcalfe family has been very good to the state of Wisconsin and their community.”
Running the business
When Tom Metcalfe retired, leaving his Sentry Foods store at Hilldale in the hands of his two sons, he made a clean break.
Although it was difficult for Metcalfe to be no longer “in the fire and in the fight,” he decided it was best to let the next generation — Tim and Kevin Metcalfe — run the business their way, Tim Metcalfe said in 2006. His mother, Margaret Metcalfe, told him that sometimes Tom Metcalfe would even shop at other stores if he was particularly bothered by something he saw in the Sentry store he once coddled.
“He would offer us advice, but it came with no strings,” Tim Metcalfe said. “Then he would separate himself from it. That I think was a special gift from him.”
Tim Metcalfe said his father, who at one time was chairman of the Wisconsin Grocers Association, made the decision to take a hands-off approach after the family attended a weekendlong succession seminar at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, two years before he retired.
In 2006, the Metcalfes received the Wisconsin Family Business of the Year Award in the large business category. They were recognized in the areas of family involvement, industry leadership, innovative practices, employee respect and community service.
Tim and Kevin Metcalfe grew up in the family business — starting with bagging, cleaning bathrooms and stocking shelves — when they were about 14, and eventually moved into management. In 2000, the year the Hilldale store was remodeled, they purchased the business from their father. The pending sale to SpartanNash marks another evolution in the Metcalfe legacy, which adjusted and survived the COVID-19 pandemic and has battled with rising food prices.
“The last four years have been challenging for the food industry and all businesses,” Tim Metcalfe said. “I’m excited about the future. The Metcalfe brand is a very well-known and a beloved brand in southern Wisconsin. And along with SpartanNash, we’re both looking to grow.”