Paige DeglowTwo years after the closure of its Kroger left Walnut Hills without a grocery store, the Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation is looking for someone to step into that void.

The potential grocery won't occupy the 33,000-square-foot former Kroger building, WHRF says — but the foundation will announce a possible use for that building soon. Instead, the foundation earlier this month released a request for proposals (RFP) from operators interested in opening a smaller store up to 4,000 square feet at one of a few locations in the surrounding business district.

The 25-year-old Kroger location closed in March 2017 after the Cincinnati-based grocery chain opened its new University Plaza store a mile and a half away in Corryville. Kroger provided temporary shuttles for residents to travel to the new store, but the closure sparked long-term concerns that Walnut Hills had become a food desert with no easy way to buy fresh food for many of the neighborhood's 6,000 residents. As new development has come, the neighborhood has wrestled with ways to maintain its diversity and accessibility to residents, many of whom are disabled, low-income, elderly or all of the above.

"The half-mile radius surrounding the Peeble’s Corner Business District is in the midst of a major renaissance," WHRF's RFP reads. "It’s been the site of $60 million of development over the past couple of years. But in the midst of all this positive momentum, there’s something missing — a conveniently-located grocery store. Our primary purpose for opening the grocery store is to serve the people in our neighborhood who are the most vulnerable — the elderly, those living in poverty, and residents with disabilities. To be sustainable though, we’ll also need customers from the surrounding, more affluent neighborhoods to become loyal shoppers. So this is the challenge… to operate a store that accounts for a broad range of price sensitivities and meets the grocery needs of a culturally diverse population."

WHRF officials say a grocery store in the neighborhood is critical. The foundation, which serves as Walnut Hills' community development corporation, gained control of the 42-year lease on the property last November with help from the city, the Cincinnati Development Fund, the Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile Jr./U.S. Bank Foundation and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation of Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. The month prior, WHRF won a $30,000 grant from Duke Energy to do community engagement, design work and the RFP process that is currently underway to establish the grocery.

The bidder WHRF picks will be expected to help decide which location the grocery store will occupy, collaborate on the store's design and offerings, work with the community to hire and train workers, undertake all the store's basic operations and ensure that a viable mix of fresh food and shelf-stable products are available, among other tasks.



WHRF says it would like the store opened by late summer this year. The full RFP is here. Proposals are due by March 31.

