Fresh & Easy Chain Will Be Sold: Industry Store to Stay Open

Fresh & Easy, the British-owned supermarket chain, that has several San Gabriel Valley stores, will be sold.

Parent company Tesco made the announcement Wednesday, and Fresh & Easy said it wouldn't close any of its existing stores.

"While we don’t yet know who our new owner will ultimately be, Tesco has already received interest from a number of parties including groups looking to purchase Fresh & Easy as an operating business," Fresh & Easy said on its Facebook page.

Fresh & Easy, which has a store in the City of Industry at Valley Boulevard and Grand Avenue, came to the United States in 2007 and was immediately hammered by the economic recession. 

When the company opened talked about its struggles in December and rumors flew that the stores might close, customers of the City of Industry store weighed in on Patch.

"Will miss it... convenient little place.. always hit it when i go to CVS...," wrote Robert Corona. "It's in a good location, right next to the fitness place. You can (gorge) and go work it off.  Hope it stays... Doubt it though. Most of em bleeding to death."

Reader Gabriela Klein said that it can take time for some of these smaller, more specialty-type markets to catch on.

"It takes a long time to establish a reputation. Trader Joe's was not an instant success either. They started very small, a family company, and expanded their products very slowly," she wrote. "F&E is a British based company, and those of us familiar with European tastes find the store interesting, but here's the problem: not quite big enough to give the feeling of the freshest quality, best prices, and not quite hip enough to make a dent in the Trader Joe's niche. It's just NOT COOL ENOUGH."

An analyst told the BBC that the stores were poorly suited to the U.S. market.

"Fresh & Easy was very confusing," International Marketing Partners' Allyson Stewart-Allen told the BBC. "You had champagne next to ready meals next to merchandising. It was a very confused proposition for Americans who couldn't work out what exactly they were."

None of its stores have turned a profit, the BBC reported.

The Los Angeles Times and NPR reported that Tesco has 5,000 employees at 200 stores around California, Nevada and Arizona.