Schnucks Fresh in Jasper to close May 24, 29 workers affected

One of Jasper’s grocery options will disappear at the end of the month, leaving shoppers to find a new place to buy their weekly staples and 29 employees deciding whether to move or walk away with severance.

Schnuck Markets said Schnucks Fresh at 3605 North Newton Street will permanently close at 6 p.m. Sunday, May 24. The company said all 29 Jasper teammates will have the option to transfer to another Schnucks location, including stores in the Evansville area, or take a severance package.

The closing removes a fresh-food grocery stop from the north side of Jasper and narrows one more source of competition for local shoppers. For families who built routines around the Germantown Shopping Center store, the change means adjusting where they shop and how far they travel for produce, meat, seafood, deli items and bakery goods. If nearby stores absorb the displaced customers, the real test will be whether they can do it without adding longer trips or pushing prices higher.

Schnucks said the decision was difficult and tied to the store’s performance. The Jasper location opened Aug. 18, 2021, as a leased 18,000-square-foot store in Germantown Shopping Center and was pitched as a smaller, fresh-focused concept for communities that could not support a full-scale supermarket. At opening, the store was expected to employ about 30 teammates, a figure nearly identical to the 29 jobs now affected.

The Jasper store was Schnucks Fresh’s original location. Coverage at the time of its opening described it as Schnucks’ seventh Indiana store and noted the company already had six stores in the Evansville area. That made Jasper part of a broader Southwest Indiana grocery footprint that now loses one of its most visible outposts.

Schnucks, founded in 1939, now operates more than 100 stores in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. For Jasper, the closure marks the end of a short run for a store that was meant to serve as a streamlined grocery option on North Newton Street. By late May, that space will be empty, and shoppers who used it will be looking elsewhere for the same trip they used to make in Jasper.