Chicago’s biggest local grocery store chain may buy out the supermarket that’s been central to Northwest Indiana life for nearly six decades, the Northwest Indiana Times reported yesterday. Jewel Food Stores wants to buy Strack & Van Til's 19 remaining stores for about $100 million, and offered to pay $70 million for the supermarkets plus an estimated $30 million for the inventory that's left in the stores when the sales go through. It would buy Strack & Van Til out of bankruptcy court as its owner, Joliet-based Central Grocers, goes under, succumbing to $225 million in debt. Strack & Van Til is closing another 14 stores this year, mainly in Illinois, that Jewel wasn't interested in. Whether the well-established Strack & Van Til brand will live on or the stores will be converted to the Jewel-Osco brand was not immediately clear. Strack & Van Til parent company Central Grocers, a century-old co-op that acquired the region’s biggest grocery chain in the late 1990s and will soon go entirely out of business as it winds down in bankruptcy court, is selling off its remaining Strack & Van Til, Ultra Foods and Town and Country supermarkets across Northwest Indiana. Another buyer could swoop in and buy the stores out of bankruptcy court if it files a better bid by a June 21 deadline. Jewel is a subsidiary of Albertsons, a Boise, Idaho-based company with 2,200 stores and more than 250,000 employees nationwide. The Itasca, Ill.-based chain owns more than 180 stores throughout the Chicago area. It is trying to acquire Strack & Van Til as a stalking-horse bidder.
