April 5, 2021

The new expanded deli area at the Sioux Falls Food Co+op opens Tuesday with additional menu offerings.

The open kitchen is in the new section of the health food grocery store at 18th Street and Minnesota Avenue, which also includes bakery items, frozen foods and coolers for meat, drinks, artisanal cheeses and grab-and-go items. While the co-op model is supported by member-owners, the grocery store is open to everyone.

To start, the deli’s hot bar will be open for lunch, general manager Patrick Sayler said. Hours will be extended to dinner in May, and eventual breakfast offerings will grow from yogurt and oatmeal bars to a hot bar for breakfast.

“In the end, after all is said and done, it’s going to be a vastly expanded menu,” Sayler said.

Outdoor seating will be available, but indoor dining will have to wait.

“Koch Hazard (Architects) came up with a really beautiful plan for the seating area, but we’re holding off until May, hoping that COVID numbers improve a little before we go too far with that,” Sayler said.

Starting Tuesday, in addition to the weekday hot bar specials, soups, smoothies and the espresso bar, customers can order from the new Co+op Kitchen Bowl bar. The kitchen crew will build the bowls to order, with options such as teriyaki chicken, Korean tofu and Japanese teppanyaki.

Lunch hours will be 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays, moving to daily in May.

“Tuesday customers will be happy. We put in giant fryers, two different fryers, to keep up with Tofu Tuesday,” Sayler said. “That was always a huge challenge in that small kitchen was just being able to make enough tofu. We would fry 40 pounds of tofu and sell it out within 24 hours.”

On tap, customers can order two styles of Songbird Kombucha, and there will be two locally brewed beers on tap.

Bakery items for special diets will be made in-house, and Look’s Marketplace will provide croissants, cookies and “treat-type” baked goods, Sayler said.

In the grocery section of the new area, one of the biggest expanded offerings will be fresh meat, which is tripling is size.

The frozen food section is a little more than twice as big, he said.

“I’ll be a wider variety, but we’re also hoping to be able to bring in more family-size options as well.”

Retail specialists will help the co-op with the final setting of products in the new area in mid-April, and then they’ll return the week of April 26 to assist with the original grocery area, which includes new shelving.

The checkout area will move to the current produce area, and crews will work in stages to install new flooring throughout the original store while it remains open.

All of the changes should be completed in May.

“They’ve been great, and Fiegen (Construction, the general contractor) has been extremely well organized and patient with the whole process because it’s really so much different than just building a store and then unlocking it and moving in,” Sayler said.

“It’s a totally different beast doing an expansion because I think a lot of folks thought well, you’re just going to build over here and then tear the wall down and then you hit the ground running. And we’re touching every square inch of this entire building. We had to put in reinforced the beams in the roof to fit this new refrigeration system that we had put in, we had to modify all of the entry doors, completely changed the layout, so it’s a lot more expansive change to the co-op operation than I think people assumed.”