The Woodman’s Food Market currently under construction at the intersection of Illnois Route 59 and 119th Street in Plainfield is on track to open this fall.

“Things are exactly on schedule,” Woodman’s President Clint Woodman said on Friday. “We’re hoping to open around Oct. 1.”

Woodman’s is focused on providing the widest variety of grocery items at the best prices, according to its website. The 243,500-square-foot store under construction is about the same size as its other stores.

In comparison, a Costco store is typically around 150,000 square feet.

“That’s pretty much our model, around 240,000 square feet,” Woodman said. “Thirty-five to 40% of the store is warehouse and then 60% is the retail store. We buy major brands directly into our stores in truckloads and that’s part of the reason we’re able to offer lower prices.”

This will be Woodman’s seventh location in Illinois. Woodman’s also has 14 stores in Wisconsin.

“We’ve been looking at the Plainfield-Joliet area for probably 15 years now,” Woodman said. “We like to have stores at a major highway intersection so people can get to our stores from long distances away. They can get on and off really easily. But we don’t build stores close to one another because we do pull from a long distance. We pull from the communities all around and Plainfield is situated in a great spot where we can pull from all the cities around it.”

Woodman’s closest store to the new Plainfield store is in North Aurora.

“There’s a lot of growth in Oswego and we can pull from further south, like Shorewood and then pull from Romeoville,” he said. “And with the I-55 corridor, people can get to the store pretty quickly from the northeast as well.”

Woodman’s stores also operate their own gas stations. There will be more pumps at the Plainfield location compared to other locations.

“There will be an in-line car wash as well,” Woodman said. “We’re starting to build those along with our gas stations. There’s one going in North Aurora.”

The Plainfield store looks to hire more than 200 employees, he said.

“We’ll start hiring people this summer,” Woodman said. “The majority of the hiring will happen in September, probably early September.”

The company is employee owned.