Supermarket

While most other big cities put national potato chip retailer Lay's at the top of their favorite list, Baltimoreans remain loyal to their regional brand. Utz leads locally with $28 million in supermarket sales in the Baltimore-Washington area, leaving Lay's in second place with $11 million, according to a Chicago company that studies food trends. Utz, produced in Hanover, Pa., is among such local favorites as Esskay bacon and Berger Cookies. And in this region, the chip has long been able to outsell Lay's potato chips, the national brand of behemoth Frito-Lay Inc. Lay's has successfully dominated the chip market in other cities throughout the country.

Rite Aid agreed Thursday to allow construction of a ShopRite supermarket in West Baltimore's Howard Park neighborhood to move forward. The move appears to eliminate the final impediment to the long-awaited grocery store. A groundbreaking has been scheduled for May 7 and construction should be complete within 10 months, said Howard S. Klein, general counsel of Klein's ShopRite of Maryland. "We have been working on this project since I was a member of the City Council representing this district," Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said.

Sponsored by the Learn to Live program of the Anne Arundel County Department of Health, educators will answer questions on nutrition and distribute free low-fat recipes at Graul's supermarket, 607 Taylor Ave., Annapolis, noon to 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. March 26, 10 a.m to 3 p.m. March 27 and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. March 28.

Stacy Keibler is inching closer to becoming TV's next Heidi Klum. Fans might recall last summer Lifetime announced Keibler would host a new reality show, "Supermarket Superstars. " But until now, no one's heard much more about it. UK's Daily Mail has posted pictures of Keibler leaving the set -- which means the show is moving along and just might be ready for public consumption soon. Keibler's reps tell Insider to expect the show to air in July. The program sounds a lot like "Fashion Star," but with food.

Folks, usually on Tuesdays we feature a Naughty Business of the Week , some tale of a business or criminal that has managed to separate consumers from their money. But let's break from tradition today to consider this Hartford Courant story about a clerk at a Connecticut supermarket who prevented an elderly woman from getting scammed . An elderly woman approached to send $2,800 via Western Union, but some gentle probing revealed that the customer was sending money to someone impersonating her grandson.

A YEAR AGO, seven Baltimore neighborhoods unexpectedly lost their local supermarkets when a small chain went out of business. The situation was nothing short of calamitous; food is not a luxury but a necessity. Finally, the situation is getting better. A week ago, the City Council approved zoning changes that will permit a supermarket to be constructed in Waverly, at 33rd Street near Gorsuch Avenue. The very next day, a new store had a grand opening in Cherry Hill, ending a year-long void in that southern Baltimore community.

Baltimore's Howard Park neighborhood could get a full-service Klein's ShopRite supermarket by late 2012 if Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake accepts a recommendation to sell city-owned land for the project. The Baltimore Development Corporation's directors voted in closed session Thursday to recommend that the city approve a land sale agreement with a Maryland group that wants to build the supermarket. The land is on Liberty Heights Avenue near Gwynn Oak Avenue. The development team selected after responding to a city-issued request for proposals is headed by Leonard Weinberg II of Vanguard Equities and businessman Roland Campbell.

Maryland State Police say they are continuing to investigate a phoned-in bomb threat to a supermarket north of Bel Air Wednesday. About 11:20 a.m., troopers from the Bel Air Barrack responded to Redner's Warehouse Market in the 2100 block of North Fountain Green Road for a report of a bomb threat, according to a state police news release. The supermarket is near the intersection of Routes 1 and 543 in Hickory, about 3 miles north of Bel Air. Management from the store informed police they received a phone call from a person who was attempting to reach a former employee, state police said.

A faded sign above the former Howard Park Super Pride store was gently lifted off the dilapidated vacant building with a crane Saturday, marking the start of construction of a new, long-awaited supermarket in the city. The Howard Park neighborhood, which is just south of Northern Parkway and borders Baltimore County to the west and the Forest Park Golf Course to the south, has been without a local grocery store for 12 years since the Super Pride was boarded up. Community leaders have worked with the city to bring back another grocer, but they've faced an uphill battle attracting developers, especially in poor economic times, while adjusting to several changes in political leadership.

There was romance among the rutabagas this afternoon in the Whole Foods grocery store, passion among the persimmons. Five singers from the Washington Opera's young artists program took to the aisles of the Harbor East market at 1001 Fleet St., disguised in the black aprons and black caps normally worn by employees of the market. A few minutes after 1 p.m., an announcement came over the store loudspeaker announcing that tickets to this weekend's Baltimore Symphony Orchestra concert were being given away in the produce section.

Harris Teeter will open its planned Ellicott City supermarket on April 2, the Charlotte, N.C., grocer said today. The store in the Towne Square at Turf Valley on Resort Road will be open 24 hours a day, with a seven-day-a-week pharmacy. Harris Teeter came to Maryland in 2010 and now has eight stores in the state, including Columbia and Fulton in Howard County and Locust Point in Baltimore. Another location will open this fall in Canton's Canton Crossing. The company is the 23 rd largest supermarket chain in the U.S., with 2012 sales of $4.54 billion.

Marie C. Vrany, a retired secretary who once foiled a pickpocket while on vacation in London, died Sunday of complications from a stroke at Carroll Hospital Center. She was 90. The daughter of a Patapsco & Back River Neck railroader and a homemaker, Marie Caroline Schissler was born in Keansburg, N.J. The eldest of five children who were orphaned by the time she was 11, Mrs. Vrany was raised by extended family members who had adjoining farms in Middle River. She was a graduate of St. Elizabeth's Commercial School, where she won awards for typing and stenography.

Baltimore County will be getting two new Weis Markets soon -- a supermarket in Towson Place  in Towson and one on Security Boulevard in Woodlawn. Both stores will open Sunday, March 3. Weis said it invested $14 million in the more than 55,000-square foot space vacated by Super Fresh in Towson and in the more than 58,000-square-foot Woodlawn store. The supermarkets will employ 400 workers and are still hiring. Each will feature 600-item produce departments with organic food, pharmacies, full-service meat and seafood departments and large deli/prepared food departments.

PriceRite discount supermarket is expected to open a 39,000-square-foot store in West Baltimore by the end of the year, according to the owner of the Mount Clare Junction shopping plaza. DLC Management Corp. announced Tuesday that PriceRite has signed a lease to be an anchor tenant at the open-air shopping plaza in Pigtown, at the corner of West Pratt and South Carey streets. “We are thrilled to welcome PriceRite to Mount Clare Junction. It was our priority to bring an established grocer back to this shopping center in order to serve a clear demand from the community,” said Adam Greenberg, DLC's associate director of Mid-Atlantic leasing, in a statement.

Baltimore is expanding a program where people in areas with limited access to healthy foods can order groceries on the Internet and pick up their purchase at a designated place in their neighborhood. The two-year-old Virtual Supermarket Program which operates from three Enoch Pratty Library branches, will now be offered at some senior centers and residences for the disabled. Residents will be able to pick up groceries at Perkins Homes, Monument East, Mount Clare Overlook Building and the Cherry Hill Senior Manor.

Baltimore County Councilwoman Vicki Almond faces the kind of decision that makes a job like hers tough. She is being asked whether to allow the rezoning of an empty industrial site in Owings Mills to allow a major retail development anchored by a Wegmans. Depending on which of the hundreds of phone calls, letters and emails she listens to, saying yes would either spark the long-awaited flowering of the less successful of the county's two designated growth areas or condemn Owings Mills to a paradoxical fate - clogged with traffic and empty stores, the suburban equivalent of Yogi Berra's complaint about a restaurant: "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded.

A neighborhood meeting in Northwest Baltimore to discuss a new supermarket opened with soft organ music and bowed heads, demonstrating the importance of such a facility to a community that has done without one for more than a decade. "We pray this night for this area, called Howard Park, in particular," the Rev. Donald Sterling said Friday at the pulpit in New All Saints Catholic Church, off Liberty Heights Avenue. On either side of the altar were displayed plans for a 68,000-square-foot state-of-the-art grocery store with more than 200 parking spaces.

The union that represents 17,000 workers at the region's two largest supermarket chains is embracing the "occupy" movement as it begins contract talks Wednesday. Anticipating difficult bargaining with Safeway and Giant Foods, the union has launched a website, occupygiantandsafeway.org, to build public support for its cause. The contract expires March 31. Tom McNutt, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400, said in a speech to union organizers last week that employees have worked hard over the last three decades to make the grocery chains highly profitable — while, he said, top executives are "making the Sheriff of Nottingham look like a saint.

Your recent editorial expressed the view that "the ban on grocery store sales of alcohol has one purpose - preventing competition, to the benefit of existing retailers and to the detriment of consumers" ("Liquor and capitalism," May 14). Yet it also has the effect of de-emphasizing liquor to families shopping for food with hard-earned dollars. All the dollars, time and effort devoted to learning about, tasting, shipping, buying and imbibing alcohol may someday be directed toward more important things, such as wholesome food, good conversation, outdoor activities and the arts - and even reading newspapers.