Piggly Wiggly to Open New Grocery Store in Tuscaloosa County

A brand new Piggly Wiggly is set to open its doors in Tuscaloosa County by the end of 2020.

The new grocery store will be on Bear Creek Road in the Taylorville Corners shopping center where Vowell's Fresh Market used to do business prior to its closure back in July.

Jay Welborn, CEO of B&W Food Inc. said he is looking forward to opening the fifth Tuscaloosa store in a location that has housed a few grocery stores in the past.

"It was originally opened in 1994 as a Food World, it was actually the last location built by the Bruno family when they were still in control of Bruno's, so it was really done well to begin with," Jay Welborn said. "In 1994, it was a really nice store at the time but it's now 25 years old and it had been through a couple of different owners with not a lot of updates made to it. We've accepted the challenge and we have gone in there and completely gutted it and I think customers who have shopped at that store will be pleasantly surprised with the end result."

Welborn, who has been in the grocery store business for over 20 years, opened his first Piggly Wiggly store off Lurleen B. Wallace Boulevard in Northport in 1998 with his father Jimmy and his business partner. Welborn said it used to be an old A&P store before they completely renovated it into the grocery store still doing business there today, which laid the groundwork for new locations for years to come.

"[Jimmy Welborn] proved a tried and true method that you find good locations with good traffic counts and a community that needs to be served," Jay Welborn said. "You go in there and you clean the store up and fill it up with good fresh groceries."

In order to maintain a level of excellence in his stores, Welborn said that the new store on Bear Creek Road will introduce some new features and technology. For instance, the store will have all of its fresh meat inside a temperature-controlled room rather than the open-air cases common in most grocery stores.

"It should improve shelf life and it will obviously improve freshness for the customer when they take it home -- they should have a better shelf life in their own refrigerators," Jay Welborn said. "Some really neat things that I think the community will benefit from."

The store will look to open its doors a week after Christmas.

For more information, check out the Piggly Wiggly Tuscaloosa Facebook page here.

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