The Kroger Co. will build a Marketplace store in Centerville.

The Cincinnati/Dayton Division of Kroger said Tuesday, Aug. 31, it will open a Marketplace store on South Main Street in the Centerville Place Shopping Center. The store will include a fuel center, the company said.

There is already a Kroger store in that shopping center. Kroger spokeswoman Rachel Betzler said that store will close and the new store will open where an Elder-Beerman store is located at the south end of the shopping center. Bon-Ton Stores Inc. said Monday it will close that store, at 1095 S. Main St., by late January.

Betzler could give no tentative dates for the current store’s closing and new store’s opening. The company has a 2011 opening in mind, it said .

The store will be the company’s largest in the Cincinnati/Dayton division at 135,000 square feet, Kroger said. The current Elder-Beerman store is about twice the size of the current Kroger store in the shopping center.

“We are very excited to make this announcement,” Geoff Covert, Kroger Cincinnati/Dayton Division president, said in a statement. “The community has been asking for a larger store for quite some time. There has even been a petition on Facebook for a Marketplace in Centerville!”

The store will employ more than 200 people, Kroger said.

The announcement is not a surprise. This spring Kroger said it was foregoing the notion of building a Marketplace store in northern Warren County in favor of a Centerville store.

Cincinnati-based Kroger has about 30 stores in the Dayton area. One of the largest food retailers in the United States, Kroger has 2,470 grocery retail stores in 31 states under nearly two dozen names.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2390 or tgnau@DaytonDailyNews.com.