About Chicago's River North

Whole Foods Moving Midwest Office to River North

We all love Whole Foods! All the samples! All the natural, healthier foods! There is so much to see inside each whole foods. And now they are planning on moving their Midwest Office to River North Neighborhood in Chicago!

(Crain's) — Grocery stores have been good to local retail landlords trying to survive this past recession. Now the downtown office market is benefiting, too.

Whole Foods Market Inc., the nation's biggest grocer specializing in natural and organic foods, is moving its Midwest headquarters from the Lakeview neighborhood to 640 N. LaSalle St. in River North, where the company is expanding its office by 50% to 36,000 square feet.

The Austin, Texas-based company plans to move its roughly 110-person regional office to 640 N. LaSalle sometime around August. The company will occupy most of the third floor of the glass-clad building best-known to many for the large Effen Vodka sign spanning its rooftop.

Whole Foods is leaving its current 24,000-square-foot home at 3241 N. Lincoln Ave. after being there more than a decade, according to a spokeswoman with the regional office.

“We've literally run out of room,” she says. “We have no more cubicles and no more offices.”

The company wanted its new office to be near one of its stores, accessible to public transit and have sufficient parking. The regional office services about 33 stores spanning seven Midwest states and Ontario, Canada. Sixteen of the regional stores are in the Chicago area, the spokeswoman says.

Whole Foods signed a 15-year lease for the office space that brings 640 N. LaSalle to more than 88% occupied, according to Melissa Rubenstein and Brian Atkinson of Jones Lang LaSalle Inc., who lease the building for its longtime owner, a venture of MAC Management Co.

Financial terms weren't disclosed, but other office space in the seven-story, 350,000-square-foot building is listed on CoStar Group Inc. for $22 to $24 per square foot gross.

At 640 N. LaSalle, Whole Foods will be able to better organize its office, the spokeswoman says, and the move provides the opportunity to design a space that fits the company's tree-hugging, granola-loving ethos. That also appealed to the building's owners, who had been trying for more than a year and a half to fill the space after a marketing firm moved out.

“It's a great opportunity for the building,” says Michael Cahan, president of Chicago-based MAC Management.

He says the building, originally built in 1970 for carmaker Chrysler, has attracted an increasingly “green” clientele in recent years. Landing Whole Foods could double or triple the already growing number of people who commute there on bicycles, Mr. Cahan says.

The River North office submarket has been outperforming the overall downtown market. At yearend the overall vacancy rate in River North stood at 14.6%, compared with 16.4% for the total downtown market, according to Jones Lang data.