Angeli Foods
Angeli Foods, also known as Angeli's Central Market or Angeli's Super Valu, was an American grocery store chain founded in Iron River, Michigan. Italian immigrant Alfred Angeli opened the first store in 1917, and the company grew to encompass several locations dotted across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Angeli Foods remained under family ownership for three generations until its sale in 2022.
History
Italian immigrant Alfred Angeli founded Angeli Foods in 1917 at 402 W. Adams St. in the growing mining community of Iron River, Michigan. It was the first self-service grocery store to open in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the first to offer a frozen food locker, and the first to offer a five-day workweek. They were also the Upper Peninsula's first independent retailer to offer profit sharing and medical insurance.Early in Angeli Foods' existence, it delivered groceries around Iron River using a 1924 Ford Model TT truck. They retained the vehicle as an in-store display after it was retired. According to the company's official history, over the next few decades Angeli Foods branched into several other industries, including a farm, the Iron Inn hotel, a feed warehouse, and pet supplies.
After Alfred Angeli's death in 1950, his grocery store remained within the family for two more generations. Alfred's son Libero worked quickly to build a new Iron River store location, on which construction began in 1953.
Under Libero, Angeli Foods continued expanding into the 1990s. They helped develop and anchored Riverside Plaza, Iron River's first shopping center, constructing a location a short distance east of the town. By 1973, Angeli Foods was grossing $7.4 million in revenue, and Libero won the Small Business Administration's "Small Businessman of the Year for Michigan" award for his work in developing the Upper Peninsula. By the 1990s, Angeli Foods had opened or acquired several other stores in the region, including:
- Menominee, Michigan:
- * A store, opened in 1967 or 1972; it was closed in the course of opening a larger location
- * A store, opened in the M&M Plaza in 1983 as a SuperValu County Market; it was later expanded to
- Marinette, Wisconsin: a store along Roosevelt Road that opened in 1992; it would eventually include an associated gas station
- Escanaba, Michigan: a Kitchen-Pantry convenience store at 1505 Washington Ave
As of 2019, the last remaining Angeli Foods store in Iron River employed over a hundred people with additional temporary workers taken on during the busier summer. The location was known for its unusually expansive array of Italian products. Explorer's Guide had previously lauded the store as an "extraordinary market", and added that its variety of fresh food options seemed "entirely out of place for tiny Iron River." Non-grocery operations included an attached Verizon mobile phone store, a UPS parcel drop-off and pick-up location, dry cleaning, a Stormy Kromer outlet center, and a sporting goods store. The latter replaced an Angeli-run video rental store in 2017 due to a rise in video streaming.
At the beginning of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, Angeli Foods worked with volunteers to allow customers to phone in their orders for contactless pickup at the store. A year later, it launched a website where customers could order their groceries for later pickup.