Around the time the out-of-town owners of Chicago’s Save A Lot grocery stores locked down a $13.5 million deal with the city of Chicago to renovate the stores, the three founders were asked to share advice for young entrepreneurs.
“Embrace the chaos and bite off more than you can chew,” co-founder Walker Brumskine says on a podcast in 2023.
Brumskine and his two friends, all Yale Law School grads, founded Save A Lot’s retail partner, Yellow Banana, in 2021. They pitched themselves to city officials as a Black-owned company with financial expertise, a grocery expert with decades of experience and a passion for Black and Brown communities — who could redo six Save A Lot stores in communities of color lacking markets by March 31, 2025.
On Wednesday, Yellow Banana cut the ribbon on its sixth and final Save A Lot store in West Lawn, after asking the city for a six-month extension when it failed to meet its March deadline.
Related
- Save A Lot reopens in West Lawn, the last of 6 grocery stores opening under $26M city deal
While residents in neighborhoods like West Lawn waited years for the promised stores, the owners of Yellow Banana were racking up business and personal problems, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned — all signs the company’s owners may have bitten off more than they could chew.
Their latest debts affected the people they told the city they would be helping. Yellow Banana’s agreement contains set-asides for certified women-owned and minority-owned companies like Ms. Sebastian Painting.
The Latina-owned company hired to paint all six stores says it had to take legal action — a first since starting the business over 10 years ago — to recoup $76,000 for work completed last fall.
Ms. Sebastian Painting had hoped a deal with Yellow Banana would bolster the family firm of about 15 to 20 employees. Instead, they haven’t been paid, so company President Yesenia Sebastian had to file liens against Yellow Banana last month in Cook County after the grocery operator stopped responding in January.
“It’s hard to be behind payment that much,” Sebastian says. “It makes us stretch ourselves very thin. It just puts a complete strain on the business because we have to pay suppliers. We have to pay our employees. We can’t be like, ‘Hey, you know, wait for us because we haven’t been paid.’”
Related
- Save A Lot coffee bar deal turns bitter
General contractor Osman Construction Corp. has also filed liens totaling $2.1 million, with $1.75 million still outstanding. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
Such liens — legal claims filed against a property as a last line of recourse when a vendor isn’t paid — would violate the city agreement, which requires full payment to contractors, Yellow Banana CEO Joe Canfield says.
“But once those draws are funded and paid out, they release the liens and off we go,” he says. “So that’s already happened on several of our stores.”
Starting out big
Financial chaos has defined much of the lifespan of the 4-year-old company founded by Brumskine, Michael Nance and Ademola Adewale-Sadik, who were looking for more meaningful work, especially after two of them lost parents.
“127 Wall [Holdings] was really born out of a desire to get closer to the communities that we came from,” Nance said on the 2023 Yale-hosted podcast. Their company, 127 Wall, is Yellow Banana’s parent company, though it appears to be defunct, as its state registration has expired.
The families of Brumskine and Adewale-Sadik — who didn’t return calls seeking comment — immigrated to the United States.
Nance “grew up on the urban east side of Cleveland. … We were at a point where we had to decide how do we bring the legal … and business and investment skills that we’ve managed to acquire over the last decade to improve the communities like the ones that we grew up in.”
“We spent like $19.99 on Legal Zoom, incorporating a Delaware LLC to carve out 32 grocery stores and raise millions of dollars from private sector and pair with public sector,” Brumskine added.
Related
- 6 Save A Lot stores were approved for $13.5M in city subsidies, but 14 months later none have opened
By the time he and Adewale-Sadik moved full time to Yellow Banana in 2022 and 2023, “It became less about, ‘Where are your natural strengths and your experiences?’ And more about, ‘What is the pressing, urgent need right now this week, and who has the capacity to do it?’”
But since that podcast episode aired, 32 stores in five states have been closed or sold, leaving only the Chicago locations. Yellow Banana also faced a slew of lawsuits from suppliers of its grocery stores, racked up over $2 million in debts and continued to delay reopenings, leaving residents without shopping options until recently.
In March, Canfield told Chicago officials they couldn’t make the deadline on the two-year redevelopment deal, blaming a sign company that went bust. Chicago Commissioner of Planning and Development Ciere Boatright approved 180 more days.
The city won’t pay Yellow Banana all $13.5 million until the company is fully compliant, which now must happen by Sep. 27. Only one of the six stores has been certified as complete, so the city has paid Yellow Banana $1.45 million, the Planning Department says.
“They’re working through their construction challenges and issues responsibly, and they can speak directly to their liens,” Boatright says. “There are no issues on our side that would stop us from a compliance standpoint.”
More lawsuits
Canfield, tapped for his decades of grocery experience, is embroiled in a lawsuit filed in Oregon by his stepsiblings accusing him of theft in 2021. His stepbrothers say he stole valuable coins from his late stepfather’s estate with his mother’s help, using the $238,500 he netted to purchase Save A Lot stores less than two months later.
Canfield joined Yellow Banana after a year at Save A Lot’s corporate office. He had also run residential and commercial construction ventures and a hockey shop in New Hampshire, the closure of which led to a 2011 bankruptcy. He’s worked for various grocery companies in supply and sales since 2000, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Canfield and his real estate companies have been sued for allegations of negligence, fraud and breach of contract. But many cases ended after plaintiffs couldn’t find Canfield to serve him with the lawsuit, leading judges to rule automatically in their favor.
One Ohio homeowner accused Canfield and his son in a 2022 lawsuit of failing to winterize his home as promised, leading to burst pipes and extensive water damage. The suit claimed Canfield became unresponsive as the contractor allowed liability insurance to lapse and lied about delays. A plaintiff in 2021 also alleged Canfield “went silent” during a residential contracting project.
Meanwhile, Canfield’s tenants — predominantly in Black communities around Cleveland — have sued him in housing court, alleging neglected repairs and health and safety issues like mold and mice. In one case, filed by a resident on disability, the property was prohibited from being rented again.
Related
- Chicago’s answer to food deserts has left a trail of debts, lawsuits, ‘can’t pay’ an $800 utility bill
His properties were hit with dozens of city violations, and city officials filed tax foreclosure suits against several properties as recently as March 31.
At the West Lawn store opening, Canfield refused to answer questions about the lawsuits against him and whether his work outside of Yellow Banana is affecting his ability to run the grocery chain. Canfield has a self-help podcast, a blog and newsletter “for those who believe in personal accountability and the dangers of big government.”
“I don’t talk about my personal life,” Canfield says. “This is the only paying job that I have. I’ve been full time on Yellow Banana since we bought the business.”
Nance called the cases “irrelevant to what we’re doing.”
Like Canfield, Nance also works in real estate and owns eight properties around Cleveland, records show. A 2024 lawsuit says Nance made knowingly false claims about a property he sold, accusations he has denied.
