Whole Foods Market succeeds Minyard’s & Safeway as Lakewood’s community grocery store

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ack in 2009, we covered the opening of Lakewood Whole Foods Market like it was the Super Bowl.

There were so many stories and columns from initial whispers to the grand opening. Lakewood/East Dallas Advocate kept readers abreast of construction updates with a 24/7 webcam feed.

Now that the hype has died down, the Whole Foods in the triangular space between Abrams Road, Richmond Avenue and Gaston Avenue is a landmark. A point of reference when giving directions, a meeting place, a destination that we’d like to be able to walk to safely. And it’s centrally located between Lakewood proper, Lakewood Heights and Lakewood Hills.

Before Whole Foods, that space was the local birthplace of the supermarket. After World War II, Safeway started building a large store there to replace two smaller ones nearby, according to Teresa Musgrove Judd’s book, Lakewood 1925-1985: A History of the Shopping Center. It opened in 1947.

This was a big deal because shopping before required more stops.

“Grocery stores back then were so small. They didn’t have everything like we have today,” Judd says to the Advocate. “A lot of stores specialized in something, some type of produce, some type of meat, whatever, and so when you shopped, you generally had to go to at least two, maybe three stores to get everything you wanted.”

Forty years after the Lakewood Safeway opened, the company sold off all its Texas stores. Minyard Food Stores Inc. (which was started by a Dallas family) picked up our shop, along with 23 others in Dallas-Fort Worth. In 1992, Minyard remodeled the Lakewood store for $1 million and grew its size by 70%, which meant a few businesses were demolished for parking and a bigger receiving dock.

The expansion provided “a floral area, a deli and salad bar with sit-down dining, video rental, and a bakery” — trappings of the modern supermarket. When Whole Foods came to Lakewood, there was more growth, such as in the “food to-go and dining area, bakery, wine aisle, decorative produce bins, and seafood counter,” according to Judd’s book. 

Whole Foods was in Lower Greenville where Sam’s Club Now is today, Judd says, and moving to Lakewood was likely a chance for expansion.

One of the Lower Greenville Whole Foods employees now works at the Lakewood store — Brian Speer, Whole Body (wellness and beauty) team leader. When he joined Whole Foods in 1994, there were only two stores in Dallas, he says.

“It was down-home,” Speer says of the Lower Greenville store. “The neighborhood, it was interesting where we were, but it was fun at the same time.”

Speer started at the Lakewood store in 2010, not long after it opened in 2009.

“I was so excited for the neighborhood,” he says. “We kind of outgrew the Lower Greenville area. It’s not that far from here to there, but there’s a lot of people in this neighborhood that wouldn’t go there that now they have their own Whole Foods. And we got to reach even more of the neighborhood because we moved closer to here.”

Grocery stores have opportunities to be more than what they are. Judd remembers how the old Safeway used to let her and her peers host bake sales out front to raise money for school groups. The store was also the place where she got to ride the mechanical horse for a quarter when she was young, and she and her family knew all the employees.

Things aren’t so different now. Whole Foods has had events and gatherings catering to the neighborhood, plus community outreach programming. When Whole Foods employee Basil Braxton Love died in 2023, over $43,000 was raised, and customers sounded off in the GoFundMe comments about their good memories of him.

Another Whole Foods employee known by customers passed away last year — Linda Marie Ford England.

“Ms. Linda was not only like my role model, but she was our work mom,” store trainer Maddy Sinclair says. “Anytime anybody needed anything from an ear to just listen to them to a hug or whatever, she was like the matriarch of our store, even of the community, too. It was insane to see how many people just poured out and showed us love for the loss.”

In the future, Store Team Leader Ernest Roy wants to do even more for the neighborhood outside of product sales, especially in terms of events and partnerships.

“I want to be able to make this store a bigger community hub,” Roy says. “It really makes a difference to me when a customer says, ‘This is my Whole Foods.’ That’s a big deal. And when a customer brings a family member here, it’s like, ‘Hey, this is my Whole Foods, let me show you this.’ That means that they are proud of us. We want them to be proud of us.”