Foxtrot Prepares For Its Second Act

Five months removed from its abrupt closure, next-gen convenience chain Foxtrot Market is preparing to reopen its doors tomorrow.

After being acquired via auction by New York-based Further Point Enterprises, the chain announced it would be reopening its first location in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood under a new name: Foxtrot Café & Market. The retailer will be aligning more closely to a coffeeshop aesthetic while still offering curated CPG food, beverages, beer and wine.

“It’s really more just an extension of how customers were naturally using the stores over the last four or five years,” founder and returning chairman Mike LaVitola told Nosh on Tuesday.

Along with its grocery and coffee bar options the revamped Foxtrot will offer an expanded, full-day menu with breakfast tacos, panini sandwiches, salads and bowls.

Although Foxtrot has adjusted its name and is expanding its coffee credentials, LaVitola is hoping that it can get back to being “a place of discovery” for customers.

Part of the problem that the original Foxtrot ran into was growing too fast, LaVitola said, referring not to its 33-store footprint but its product assortment.

Foxtrot carried about 2,500 products in its first seven or eight years before it ballooned to about 5,000 by the time it shut its doors, he said.

“From a customer perspective, you lose a point of view. When you start carrying eight different sparkling waters and extrapolate that over every category, it’s much harder for teams to manage. It didn’t allow us to go really deep with the brands that we did carry,” LaVitola said.

Foxtrot has retained its former director of grocery Kristen Pospychala as the refreshed concept’s senior director of merchandising, private label and sourcing. LaVitola said that Foxtrot strayed from “telling brand stories” and instead became less purposeful about what it carried and why.

“They seem like small decisions, but it really erodes the [Foxtrot] brand away, and that’s what customers always responded to,” he said.

The question is, will brands return after the Foxtrot fallout where many businesses were left unpaid for products that ended up rotting away in shuttered stores or warehouses?

It appears two brands offered at the original Foxtrot would be returning to shelves. Sparkling adaptogenic beverage brand heywell and tinned seafood maker Fishwife were both featured last week on Foxtrot’s Instagram account.

Yet not everyone is excited for the return of the retailer.

Legally Addictive Foods commented on a separate post that the indulgent snack brand was “charged $25k by our distributor that you made us sign up for because there was product you ordered sitting in the warehouse when you closed.”

Many others on the social platform posted comments asking if Foxtrot’s new ownership team had repaid its suppliers or former employees.

Foxtrot did not comment on if Further Point Enterprises would be paying former vendors and suppliers for product lost when Outfox Hospitality closed the stores. The company also did not comment on if former employees would be compensated for unpaid labor.

When asked how Foxtrot’s new leadership team had approached its former vendors, LaVitola conceded that what happened was “awful” and that his team spent most of the summer meeting with founders to “find the best path forward.”

“The overwhelming majority of brands have come back,” he said. “There also have been some that said, ‘This all happened really suddenly, and we are still interested, but let’s wait a month or two and see how things pan out.’”

Lex Evan, founder of Lexington Bakes, got a call in July from the new Foxtrot team asking if the premium brownie brand would be interested in coming back as part of the reopening. Taking it from a purely business perspective, Evan agreed.

“I can separate the brand from who was running it and what they did with it,” he said. “But in terms of a business decision, I don’t want a grudge to hold me back from potentially winning at a store that I was winning before. In my mind, it’s my risk to do it again and say we’re going to sell at Foxtrot again. Obviously, the terms are going to be different, but I still think Foxtrot is an awesome concept.”