Everyone in Mitchell County has been tracking the same story since Hurricane Helene flooded the Ingles on Greenwood Avenue in September 2024. Every few months a new headline surfaces, an SEC filing gets parsed, a town council meeting gets quoted, and the same question gets asked again: when does Ingles come back. It's a fair question. For nearly two years, the closure of that one store pushed grocery runs into Marion, Burnsville, Weaverville, Avery County, and for households up in the Poplar area above Bakersville, sometimes across the state line into Tennessee, because it was shorter than the drive to the nearest Walmart.
But Ingles isn't the store that reopens first. Neither is Food Lion, which is quietly rebuilding its own store at the same time a few miles away. The first one to actually put groceries on a shelf in Spruce Pine is a 1,000-square-foot nonprofit market on Lower Locust Street that most people outside downtown haven't heard of yet.
The store everyone's been watching
The Ingles news did move forward this year. In June 2026, Town Manager Daniel Stines confirmed that Ingles has closed on a new site along Highway 19, between Greenwood Road and NC-226A, and has begun development plans there. That's a different spot than the old Greenwood Avenue location, which sat closer to the North Toe River and took on catastrophic flood damage when the river overflowed its banks during Helene.
Stines said construction could start as early as August 2026, though Ingles' own chief financial officer has said it's too early to commit to a build timeline. Grocery store construction of this scale typically takes a year or more from groundbreaking to opening day, which means even a fast start this fall puts a realistic opening well into 2027, not this holiday season and likely not next one either. When it does open, it's expected to employ 180 to 200 full-time workers, two to three times the staff size of the original store, according to figures cited by Mitchell County Chamber of Commerce executive director Bill Slagle.
That's real progress. It's also still mostly a construction schedule, not a shopping trip.
The rebuild getting less attention
Ingles isn't the only anchor grocery project moving in Mitchell County right now. Food Lion is doing something similar a few miles away in Grassy Creek. Demolition began this summer on the longtime Food Lion store there, clearing the way for a new 37,000-square-foot supermarket at the same Spruce Pine Commons shopping center. The rebuild is expected to add curbside pickup and home delivery, options the previous store didn't have. Food Lion hasn't announced a construction timeline or opening date, which puts it in the same holding pattern as Ingles: confirmed, underway, and not yet on a calendar residents can circle.
Two anchor grocery chains rebuilding at once in a county this size is not a small thing. It also means the two stores people have historically relied on most for a full weekly shop are both, for now, still just active job sites.
The one that's actually opening this fall
While those two projects work through construction, a much smaller store is set to open on a real timeline. TRACTOR Food & Farms has announced it will open The TRACTOR Store this fall at 207 Lower Locust Street, right in downtown Spruce Pine. It's a nonprofit grocery model, built inside a building that was itself renovated after sustaining damage during Helene, and it's stocking fresh produce, meat, dairy, baked goods, and pantry staples sourced from farms and producers within 300 miles of the region.
At 1,000 square feet, it isn't going to replace a full-scale supermarket run. Nobody is going to do a two-week Costco-style stock-up there. But it's the only one of the three grocery projects in Mitchell County right now with an actual season attached to it instead of a construction estimate, and it's opening in a location the other two aren't: on foot, downtown, within walking distance for anyone living in or near the historic business district rather than out on the Highway 19 corridor or over in Grassy Creek.
That geography matters more than it might sound like at first. Since Helene, a full grocery trip in Spruce Pine has meant getting in a car and driving to another town. The TRACTOR Store is the first project to put a real grocery option back inside downtown itself, walkable the way the pre-storm Ingles once was for people who lived nearby.
Three projects, three different jobs
It helps to see the three side by side, because they aren't solving the same problem on the same schedule.
- Ingles, Highway 19 between Greenwood Road and NC-226A: site secured, construction possibly starting August 2026, no confirmed opening date, expected to become one of the county's larger employers once open.
- Food Lion, Spruce Pine Commons in Grassy Creek: demolition underway on a new 37,000-square-foot store at the existing site, curbside pickup and delivery planned, no construction timeline announced.
- TRACTOR Store, 207 Lower Locust Street downtown: opening this fall, nonprofit model, fresh and local sourcing from within 300 miles, smallest footprint of the three.
None of these three, on its own, ends the description county officials have used since the storm, a food desert. Together, though, they're the first sign since September 2024 that grocery access in Mitchell County is actually being rebuilt on more than one front at once rather than waiting on a single company's timeline. Slagle has pointed out that every month those two anchor stores stayed closed, the sales tax dollars that would have gone to Mitchell County kept landing in Yancey and McDowell counties instead, wherever residents ended up doing their shopping. Getting all three moving at the same time is the first real chance to bring some of that spending back home.
For now, the practical version of this story is simple. If you've been driving to Marion or Weaverville for a real grocery trip, that's probably still the move through the end of this year. But if you're downtown or nearby this fall, keep an eye on Lower Locust Street. It's a small store, but it's the first one that's actually going to be open.
Downtown Spruce Pine has been reshaping itself block by block since the storm, and grocery access is just the latest piece of that story to shift. If you want a closer look at what else has changed on the ground downtown this year, our earlier look at how Upper Street absorbed Lower Street's displaced tenants is a good place to start. For more on daily life across the wider area, our Spruce Pine neighborhood page rounds up what's changing block by block.
Kelly keeps close tabs on stories like this because they're part of what makes a place feel like home again, not because a grocery store changes a listing sheet. If you're thinking about property in Spruce Pine or just want to talk through what's happening in town, Kelly Jones is always glad to catch you up.
