Fresh & Easy, or, in full, Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market, is a chain of small supermarkets on the West Coast of the United States. It is a subsidiary of the UK-based retailer Tesco, the world's fourth largest retailer, and is Tesco's attempt to expand into the United States.It has plans for rapid growth - the first stores opened in November 2007 and there are now (January 12, 2009) 107 stores in Southern California, Arizona and Nevada.
On February 9, 2006, Tesco announced that it planned to move into the United States by opening a chain of small format grocery stores on the West Coast (Arizona, California and Nevada) in 2007 named Fresh & Easy. The initial planned capital expenditure is up to £250 ($507m) million per year. Tesco CEO Terry Leahy stated,
"We have committed serious resources to developing a format that we believe will be really popular with American consumers".
Investors responded with some skepticism to the project, with a small fall in the company's share price on the day of the announcement.
There is a distribution centre in Riverside, California and the company will initially expand into northern and southern California, Phoenix, Arizona, and Las Vegas, Nevada. The San Francisco Bay Area will be served by a new distribution centre in Stockton, California that shall feed into 500 planned Bay Area stores.
Three months later, in May 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported that Tesco had purchased a 130,000 m2 (1,400,000 sq ft) distribution centre in Riverside County, California, near Los Angeles, and planned to acquire another in Phoenix, Arizona. The markets were expected to be around 1,400 m2 (15,000 sq ft) - good sized supermarkets in many countries, but about one-third the size of an average supermarket within the U.S..
By January 2007, Tesco opened its U.S. headquarters in El Segundo, California, near Los Angeles International Airport. Tesco also began construction on the Riverside County distribution centre in Moreno Valley, California near the former March Air Reserve Base, This distribution centre will have California's largest solar panel roofing system. The company is looking for another distribution centre location in Stockton, California, strategic for entering the Northern California region
