Ground broken on Vineyard grocery store scheduled to open by end of 2025

Developers and city officials braved sub-freezing temperatures and wind gusts Wednesday morning to ceremoniously break ground on what stands to be Vineyard’s first grocery store.

Bella’s Market is being built in Utah City, an ambitious 700-acre master-planned community fronted by the Woodbury Corp. and Flagship Cos. that is in the early stages of development on the site of the former Geneva Steel Mill in Vineyard.

The grocery store, which will be supported and managed by Logan-based Lee’s Marketplace through a partnership with Utah City, is one of the first amenities planned in Utah City.

And constructing it was high on the developer’s priority list, said Abel Porter, the director of strategic initiatives for Utah City and an operating partner for Bella’s Market.

“We truly did listen to the residents when thinking through how we were going to — and when we were going to — build the grocery store,” Porter said. “In fact, as we were feeling it out for the last two years or 18 months or so, most experts in the industry would tell you that Vineyard is not ready to have its own grocery store yet, just from a population standpoint.

“Even though we were given that advice from a couple of different sources, we still thought it was important enough to push it to the very front of the priority list in terms of building it and getting it open,” he added. “We’ve had boots on the ground down there. We’ve heard everyone say that a grocery store in Vineyard would be super beneficial to their lives.”