Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Tesco's Fresh & Easy to Build Brand New Grocery Store in New 315,000 Square Foot Shopping Center in Fast-Growing Gilbert, Arizona


Tesco's Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market will be the food and grocery retail anchor of a new 315,000 square foot shopping center called Higley Pavilion in Gilbert, Arizona, which is in the Phoenix Metropolitan region, we've learned.

Fresh & Easy has signed a lease for 14,000 square feet of retail space in the new center, where it will built a new, from the ground-up small-format, convenience oriented Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market grocery store.

The new center is located on the northwest corner of Queen Creek and Higley roads in the fast-growing Phoenix region city of Gilbert.

A big-box Lowe's Home Improvement store, which is already open, is the center's primary (and largest) retail anchor store. The new Fresh & Easy grocery market in the center is scheduled to open next year, according to Kornwasser Shopping Center, the landlord.

Since the new Gilbert Fresh & Easy store will be built from the ground-up, rather than being located in renovated former retail buildings like the majority of the grocer's current 61 stores are, it will give Tesco the opportunity like it has with some of the other new stores it's constructing to implement many of its "green" building design practices, including conservation measures it's adopted as a member of LEED, the U.S. Green Building Council, which is recognized in the U.S. as setting the most superior standards in "green" building design and construction.

This won't be the first Fresh & Easy grocery store in Gilbert. The Phoenix Metropolitan region is the grocer's number two most important target market in terms of potential sales volume after Southern California. It currently has 11 Fresh & Easy stores open in the region, with 14 more set to open before the year is over.

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