Hometown Business Spotlight: Lake City Food Center

Eric & Suzy Peterson have been operating the Grocery store in Lake City for 4.5 years since May 2014. The couple purchased the store from Mark Mittelstadt, who operated it for almost 30 years. Mark got supplies from the wholesaler Supervalu out of Minneapolis, and Eric worked for the Supervalu Corporation for almost 30 years.
Eric heard that Mark’s Supervalu was for sale around Thanksgiving of 2013. Both he and Suzy were raised in Iowa, and that intrigued them to investigate the location. The sale worked out on May 5, 2014.
Mark stepped aside and Eric took the store in a different direction. Improvements were on the horizon, starting with the installation of a brand new computer scanning cash register system. Eric, Suzy and Dawn Mittelstadt spent all waking hours entering all of the inventory into the automated system so that in 14 days all of the inventory in the store could be scanned and entered using stock keeping units. UPC’s - which are Universal Price Codes. That was the beginning.
The next step was building a liquor room in the back of the store, in the old deli sit down area. Walls were built, mud was thrown, paint was splattered, and a liquor room inside the store was completed.
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