Mi Rancho plans 1st San Francisco store in food desert

Mi Rancho Supermarket, which operates five stores in the San Francisco area, is planning to open its first store in San Francisco in the coming months, according to local reports.

The new, 14,000-square-foot store would fill a long-vacant space in a food desert in the Bayview neighborhood, according to the news website The San Francisco Standard.

A spokesperson for Mi Rancho could not be reached for comment.

Mi Rancho, founded in 1994, is a family-owned chain based in Redwood City, Calif., that focuses on Hispanic grocery items and includes an in-store bakery, called Mi Panaderia, and a prepared foods department, called Mi Cocina. Mi Rancho currently has two stores each in Redwood City and San Jose, and one in San Leandro.

The new San Francisco location had previously been a food store called Duc Loi’s Pantry, which had closed its doors in 2019, local reports said. From 2011 to 2013, the store had been home to a Fresh & Easy, the small-format grocery chain founded by British retailer Tesco in an effort to break into the U.S. market, which Tesco has since divested.

The Bayview neighborhood where the Mi Rancho store is set to open is a largely Black, Latino, and Asian neighborhood, according to local reports. It is located in an area called the Third Street Corridor, which is home to San Francisco’s largest concentration of Black-owned businesses, according to Economic Development on Third, a nonprofit organization that seeks to promote the area.

“We’re pleased that many of our seniors and residents in the area will have a full-access grocer within walking distance,” Ed Shaddix, executive director of EDOT, told The San Francisco Standard.

In 2022, The Save Mart Cos. opened a Lucky supermarket in the Bayview area at the location of a former Walgreens, about 1.3 miles from the new Mi Rancho site.