C‑Towns Become Key Foods

Yezenia Lebron succeeded in finding pork loin, bacalao, and Fiesta Campesina flower cookies at her go-to Grand Avenue grocery store — even as she struggled to get used to the supermarket’s new name above the door.

Lebron offered that food-focused perspective Monday while standing with a full shopping cart beside the automatic sliding doors of the newly renamed Key Food grocery store at 325 Ferry St.

Up until two weeks ago, that supermarket at the bustling Fair Haven intersection of Ferry Street and Grand Avenue was called C‑Town.

As of Feb. 22, the long-familiar sign there has been replaced by new large red letters reading: ​“Key Food.” 

Same goes for the now-ex-C-Town in the Kimberly Square section of the Hill at 482 Greenwich Ave.

While the name has changed, much about the Ferry Street supermarket and the fellow C‑Town-turned-Key Food on Greenwich Avenue in the Hill will stay the same. That’s according to Kelvin Lopez, who is one of the co-owners of the two independently owned New Haven grocery store franchises.

He said the owners of both local grocery stores haven’t changed. (While Lopez is in New Haven, his business partners for both the Grand Avenue and Greenwich Avenue supermarkets are based in Florida.) He said both supermarkets will retain their staffs, roughly 60 full-time and part-time workers on Grand Avenue and another 35 at Greenwich.

And he said that the Kimberly Square market should still be moving ahead with expansion plans later this year, even as the owners have patched up damages caused by a recent car-into-grocery-store crash. (Both C‑Towns had been open for decades, with the Greenwich Avenue location opening in 2004 and the Ferry Street store having opened years before that.)

What has changed, Lopez said, is that the two New Haven supermarkets are now part of a larger network of independently owned grocery stores.

“They’re a bigger supplier than what C‑Town currently has,” Lopez said about Key Food. He said Key Food currently has ​“over 400 stores” across the country, while C‑Town has closer to 200. ​“We were running into too many hiccups with supplies,” he said. ​“The idea is to provide more varieties [of food] in the neighborhoods, and also lower pricing.”

Lopez was asked if the newly named Key Food stores will continue to stock foods that cater to Latin American cuisine in the way that the C‑Towns did.

“We’re going to keep” carrying those foods while also making the stores’ shelves ​“a little bit more diverse,” he responded.

Inside the Ferry Street supermarket Monday, store manager Herb Pellot agreed. ​“It’s a good change,” he said about the switchover from C‑Town to Key Food. ​“They have more merchandise.” There’s ​“no need for the customers to be worried.” It will be the ​“same nice people” working here. ​“The same clean store” to shop at.

Outside of the Ferry Street Key Food, Lebron was worrying. ​“I’m so mad about” the name change, she said. 

Not because the East Haven resident wasn’t able to find the groceries she was looking for when she headed out to Grand Avenue Monday morning. But instead because she has long identified the C‑Town brand, and the C‑Town store in Fair Haven in particular, with shelves that carry all of the ingredients she needs when cooking up a Puerto Rican-inspired meal.

“It’s associated with this Latino community,” she said about the now-ex-C-Town. She said she could go to ShopRite if she wanted to prioritize low costs. Instead, she regularly went to C‑Town to buy rice and beans, salted cod, malanga, yucca, and produce that she described as fresher than in most other stores.

“You do not find this food” at just any major grocery store, she said. She said she hopes that the newly named Key Food continues to carry what she’s long turned to C‑Town to buy.

Beverly Campbell was more sanguine about the store name change as she sat outside of the Ferry Street store eating from a newly purchased bag of sweet tamarinds.

“I saw the same foods” when she was shopping Monday morning, she said.

A native of Jamaica who has lived on Blatchley Avenue for 10 years, Campbell said she regularly walks over to C‑Town — now Key Food — to buy a favorite treat that reminds her of home. Even though the sweet tamarinds she purchases from the Grand Avenue store hail from Thailand, she said, she grew up eating a similar treat in Jamaica.

While walking into the Ferry Street store, Carlos Rodriguez, who lives in the Robert T. Wolfe apartments across from Union Station, said he regularly comes to C‑Town — now Key Food — to buy ​“plantains, bananas.” ​“They got everything,” he said, even as he lamented, ​“Everything is too expensive.”