FAMILY BUSINESS ENTERS A NEW ERA

In the ’90s, Minneapolis native Rick Anderson worked out of Philadelphia as a management consultant, traveling multiple times per week and meeting with leaders from Fortune 500 companies across the U.S. Then, in the early 2000s, he left his job to run his family’s liquor business.

Recently married and expecting his first child, Anderson says, “The timing was right to stop the jet-set lifestyle and be at home.” And what better place to settle down than his native Minneapolis? “[It] was the best career move I ever made in my life,” Anderson says, in part, because the decision allowed him to spend more time with his family and because it helped him expand his family’s 60-plus-year-old business.

Originally located in downtown Minneapolis, France 44 Wine & Spirits opened as Red Anderson’s Liquors— named after Rick Anderson’s grandfather—in the late 1950s.

In the 1970s, Rick’s dad bought the land on the corner of France Avenue South and West 44th Street and moved the business to Minneapolis’ Linden Hills neighborhood. As a teenager, Anderson worked in the new location—by then named France 44—doing mostly what he calls “drudgery jobs” like dusting bottles, stocking shelves and filling bags of ice.

Since he returned to the business in the early 2000s and eventually took over in 2010, Anderson has expanded his grandparents’ small liquor store, both physically and in terms of product offerings. This larger business not only offers wine, liquor and beer but also sandwiches and salads, cheese, deli items and meat. Besides the Minneapolis location, France 44 also operates two sister stores, the St. Paul Cheese Shop and the St. Paul Meat Shop.

Now, the business is entering another new era: Anderson recently completed a 9,000-square-foot addition to the Minneapolis store, which includes over 4,000 square feet for a new event space and another 5,000 square feet for business operations, including a new loading and receiving area.

The team unveiled the new space in November and has begun welcoming customers into it. With a rooftop patio, classroom, demonstration kitchen and fireplace lounge, the remodeled space is built for flexibility and comfort, says Karina Roe, a certified sommelier and France 44’s general events manager and wine specialist. Sliding doors separate the classroom and kitchen areas from the patio and fireplace lounge, adding a fluidity to the addition.

With this expansion, France 44 is offering an expanded array of courses on wine, beer, cheese and other delicacies, and has partnered with the Wine and Spirits Education Trust to offer professional wine courses in its new classrooms.

In January, France 44 kicked off a robust class and event schedule, with 20–30 classes being offered in the first three months of the year. Roe says these classes will primarily be taught by France 44 staff, but they’ll also occasionally bring in partners from small businesses and wineries.

Clients can also rent the space for a wide range of private events—birthdays, company outings, team-building events and holiday parties. “But we also want to make it just really, really accessible for a lot of different groups of people,” Roe says, including nonprofits and community groups in the area.

With this new space at its fingertips, the team is also envisioning ways to spontaneously welcome the surrounding community into the new space on nights when there aren’t any other events booked. Pop-ups will be announced on social media and will include food offerings from the cheese shop.

“The number one function of the new space is to be event-specific, but there will definitely be [designated] times where we’ll run ‘open hours,’ so people can come up with their glass of wine and sandwich from the cheese shop,” Roe says.

“It’s definitely the sort of thing [for] people who live in the neighborhood or who are friends of ours,” Anderson says. “There will be opportunities for them to come and be a part of what we’ve built here.”

Roe says the space is designed “to be so welcoming … Like you’re stepping into someone’s home but with a slightly more elevated touch to it.”

Written by Kira Schukar