Whole Foods on Thursday said it will keep all the Wild Oats Boulder stores open, using one of them to experiment with a convenience market format.

Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods, which closed its $671 million acquisition of Wild Oats this week, said it hasn't determined plans for stores outside of Boulder.

"With Boulder being the headquarters for Wild Oats, it was important to focus there first," said Cathy Cochran-Lewis, marketing director for Whole Foods.

Whole Foods' planned changes include resurrecting the Alfalfa's Market name at the Wild Oats store on Broadway and Arapahoe Avenue. The store opened in 1983, and the chain eventually merged with Wild Oats.

"Boulder consumers have a very strong emotional attachment to the Wild Oats brand," said Stan Slater, a professor at Colorado State University's College of Business. "This is a way for Whole Foods to show their commitment to that very important consumer group. Boulder's seen as a pacesetter in the natural- and organic- foods market."

The Wild Oats flagship store in the Twenty Ninth Street shopping center, originally slated to launch in March, won't ever open. Whole Foods said it plans to either sell or sublease the space to a nonfood retailer.

The Twenty Ninth Street mall had counted on a grocery store to lure shoppers to the convenience-oriented side of the center, which also includes a Home Depot.

"Wild Oats has a multiyear lease on the space," said Lain Adams, property manager at the center. "We are communicating with our corporate office as to what their intentions are, but those are very preliminary conversations."

Whole Foods will keep the name of the Ideal Market, a north Boulder institution for 65 years. All of the former Wild Oats stores will undergo varying degrees of renovations, which may take as long as 18 months, and they'll stock Whole Foods products such as its 356 Everyday Value private label.

"Keeping the Alfalfa and Ideal name is a really cool tribute," said Darrin Duber-Smith, president of Green Marketing and a visiting marketing professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver. At the same time, "Whole Foods is very clearly destroying the Wild Oats brand, which is smart."

Whole Foods said it will convert the 18,500-square-foot Wild Oats on Baseline Road to an experimental format called Whole Foods Market Express, which will feature more value-priced items and prepared foods to appeal to neighborhood shoppers in a hurry.

The new, smaller-store concept comes as British grocer Tesco plans to launch its 10,000-square-foot "Fresh & Easy" markets in the U.S. later this year, focusing on fresh produce and ready-to-eat meals. By comparison, Whole Foods is building stores an average size of 48,400 square feet, and the Pearl Street store will fill 73,000 square feet after its expansion.

Whole Foods might expand the Express concept to other regions if it's a hit, -Cochran-Lewis said.

Whole Foods also plans to lower prices at all of its 23 Rocky Mountain region stores within the next month, kicking it off with a 10 percent-off weekend.

The fate of Wild Oats' 240 corporate employees is up in the air. Whole Foods' Cochran-Lewis said the merger is adding about 40 positions in the company's Rocky Mountain regional operations, and there are more jobs available in other regions, as well as the national headquarters in Austin, Texas.

While Whole Foods retained all of the Wild Oats stores in Boulder, experts said shoppers shouldn't expect the same in other cities.

"I can guarantee there will be areas where they will close the underperforming Wild Oats or the ones that are too close to Whole Foods' stores," Duber-Smith said.

Changes on the horizon

• The Whole Foods store on Pearl Street will expand to become a 73,000-square-foot store scheduled to open by 2010. Another 200 employees will be hired for a total of 500.

• The Ideal Market in North Boulder will keep its name and undergo "significant upgrades."

• The Wild Oats store at Broadway and Arapahoe Avenue will return to its original Alfalfa's Market name.

• The Baseline Road Wild Oats will become a new concept called Whole Foods Market Express, focused on value-priced items for shoppers in a hurry.

• The Wild Oats Superior store will change its name to Whole Foods.

• The Twenty Ninth Street mall Wild Oats won't open.

davisj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2514.

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