By the fall, the once-derelict shopping center at 75th and Quivira in Shawnee will look much different with the opening of a new grocery store.
Serving as the anchor store for Westbrooke Green Shopping Center, a new El Mercado Fresco location called Fresh Market of Shawnee, is scheduled to open this fall.
“As soon as the shelves go up, labels go up, food goes in, then it’s time to start cleaning everything (and open). This is coming along good. Everybody seems to be real happy,” said Eric Savaiinaea, the real estate broker with the project.
The store will serve a variety of customers, Savaiinaea said.
“It’s a pretty diverse community around here, and being able to go into a store and have everything for you to your specific desires, that’s a big deal. It’s not going to be like a Hy-Vee or a Price Chopper, but not that far off. They’ll just have a more diverse mix,” Savaiinaea said.
The store is the first of a number of planned new stores for the long-crumbling shopping plaza. (Meanwhile, Mi Pueblito, a longtime tenant there, is moving to a new spot in Shawnee: More on that here.)
The plaza is home to a new apartment complex, while the retail side is getting a facelift with new exteriors, windows and roofing.
Similar to how Savaiinaea described the grocery store, the shopping center as a whole will serve a diverse crowd, Paul Guastello Jr. with property owner Westbrooke Partners LLC told the Shawnee City Council in February.
“We have the daily needs with the grocery store (and) also, have some luxury needs with the nail salon and such … (It’s a) walkable location for a lot of residents. There’s a lot of multifamily around that. So, producing (a) product that could be walked to and it services the area is very important,” he said.
Grocery store is “built from the ground up”
Moving into the old Dillon’s grocery store location, which closed in 2008, Fresh Market of Shawnee’s construction hasn’t been as easy as simply moving into an old shopping space, Savaiinaea said.
“We built everything from ground up. All we had was a shell, so everything in here is brand new,” he said.
With construction going on since July 2025, it was a “long, messy job” to start, Savaiinaea added.
“We gutted everything, and that’s probably the hardest part. It was a long, messy job, but we got it done, and then we went right to town,” Savaiinaea said.
The grocery store will offer a variety of fresh foods, from produce, meat, seafood and poultry to baked goods and grocery items from around the world.
The chain, which touts itself as “your Hispanic grocery store,” has 9 other store locations on both sides of the state line, including one at 103rd and Metcalf in Overland Park.
“It’s going to be healthier, more cultural, more of a roots-type thing,” Savaiinaea said. “Where they source all the fruit and produce … Their sourcing is really good.”
Shopping plaza with through many starts and stops
What was once known as Westbrooke Village, the shopping center had fallen into a state of storefront vacancies and dilapidation a decade ago. Developers razed most of the shopping center, while some tenants, including Mi Pueblito and a liquor store, held on a bit longer.
In November 2017, the shopping center’s previous developers received millions in tax increment financing and community improvement district funding, with the plan making it a combined mixed-use residential and retail space. They renamed the site Westbrooke Green and pressed forward.
While some progress was made in the form of razing old buildings in the plaza and building The Chadwick Apartments at Westbrooke Green, city leaders were still concerned about the lack of movement made to the storefronts.
“We’re not getting what we were promised from the developer,” Jacklynn Walters, a city councilmember at the time, said to the developers at an October 2023 city council meeting.
In 2024, Westbrooke Partners took over the redevelopment project and reached a new agreement with the city.
Having been a part of conversations leading up Westbrooke Green’s redevelopment, former Shawnee City Councilmember Tony Gillette expressed satisfaction with the progress he’s seen.
“My congratulations to the current City Manager and Staff for pushing for the successful completion of the project. I’m happy to have been a small part of the turnaround there,” he said in an email to the Johnson County Post.
Grocery store is first step in renovating plaza
The old Dillon’s grocery store is not the only building in the plaza getting a makeover.
“We’re just really giving the whole shopping center in its entirety a complete makeover —changing the windows, changing the facade, changing everything,” Savaiinaea said.
Other pending tenants in the plaza, previously stated by Guastello to the city council, include:
- a Mexican restaurant
- a Chinese restaurant
- a barbershop
- a nail salon
- a coffee and donut shop
- and a national pizza franchise
It will also look to renovate and fill the old Mi Pueblito space, which will be vacated by Friday as it moves to a new location.
Overall, Guastello said at the February city council meeting that he’s proud of the progress they’ve made bringing the grocery store back to life.
“(We’re) taking that old blighted building and kind of bringing it back to life, not just from an economic standpoint, but from a visual standpoint, where people could live in the area, [be] proud to live around it, versus it being an eyesore,” he said.
Check out what the interior of Fresh Market of Shawnee looks like on the inside as construction continues:
