That’s the same location that Riverdale Mayor Braden Mitchell announced in December 2024 as the future site of a new Trader Joe’s store. The recent flurry of activity there undoubtedly serves to ease the fears of people who have speculated on the status of the project via social media, with some going so far as to contact the city and/or Trader Joe’s directly.

“People are very passionate about it, and so they have done their own digging, like, ‘I’m going to get to the bottom of this,'” Mitchell told the Standard-Examiner on Wednesday.

While Trader Joe’s has not yet made an official announcement regarding a Riverdale location, representatives from the company have been in communication with the city and participated in city meetings, according to Mitchell, who also noted that a lease has been signed and a permit to sell beer was also awarded recently.

Mitchell did not offer a definitive date for an announcement from Trader Joe’s or a ribbon-cutting at the store but mentioned late fall or winter as a possible window for its opening. In any case, the eventual arrival of a Trader Joe’s in Riverdale will be the culmination of a years-long effort by the city and many residents to lure the grocery chain, which is headquartered in Monrovia, California.

“We had worked real hard from our side, as far as sending packets of information to Trader Joe’s about Riverdale and the benefits of locating in Riverdale,” Mitchell said. “We work really well with businesses, and we are very experienced with getting them in quickly.”

There was also a citizen campaign, which involved residents officially requesting a store via a submission form on the Trader Joe’s website.

Flash forward to now, and the process of readying the building is finally underway.

“They have come in and pulled some permits to start working on the shell and, I believe, the interior even. Fencing has gone up along the front and they’ve started to remove asphalt off the front portion of the building for the parking lot as they prepare,” Mitchell said. “I will be especially relieved when they cut the hole in the front of the building. That’s, I think, what’s going to really calm everybody down and finally make people realize that it’s real.”

More than that, though, he’s excited about the potential economic impact the store could have in his city; Trader Joe’s reportedly outpaces competitors like Walmart and Whole Foods in sales per square foot by a significant margin.

Riverdale’s Trader Joe’s will be the chain’s sixth location in the Beehive State and the first of its kind north of downtown Salt Lake City.