The grand opening of the San Francisco Bay Area's newest supermarket drew so many people to an outdoor shopping mall in the East Bay that local police asked drivers to avoid the area to ease traffic congestion.
Shoppers began lining up at Tokyo Central at the Bay Street Emeryville mall at 12:30 a.m., more than nine hours before the event began, with warm hats and lawn chairs, as though buying tickets to a rock concert in the 1980s. The organizers said thousands of customers showed up during the store's first weekend to sample its fresh-cut handrolls, Japanese skin care products and anime-themed gummies.
It was the payoff of a years-long effort by the mall's owners to land a supermarket anchor for a property that once struggled to lure customers and tenants. Tokyo Central is just the latest in a growing number of Asian markets in the Bay Area.
CenterCal Properties scooped up the struggling shopping center in the bayside enclave of Emeryville, California, for $90.5 million in 2021. The Costa Mesa, California-based company has since spent $70 million on renovations and transformed the mall from a struggling retail center that was 30% vacant into a bustling, almost fully occupied entertainment destination.
"Wow, what an amazing day! I’ve never seen such an incredible opening,” said CenterCal founder and Chief Executive Jean Paul Wardy in an emailed statement to CoStar News, noting that the line outside the new store had snaked “around the block and all the way into the parking structure. It really just shows you how excited the community is.”
Grocery stores have been a standout option for shopping center landlords since the pandemic, when customers largely prioritized online shopping — except for buying groceries and other essentials. Expanding grocers are hunting for locations in a market where the national vacancy rate is a tight 4.3%, according to CoStar data.
Bay Area food desert
The 40,000-square-foot specialty supermarket is the first new grocery store to open in years in Emeryville, an area some call a grocery store desert despite being home to luxury apartments and high-profile companies.
The former industrial enclave on the East Bay waterfront serves as the hometown of animation studio Pixar and biotech firms such as Bayer, Novartis and Zymergen, as well as Peet’s Coffee.
Until a few days ago, Emeryville residents had a choice of Trader Joe’s or Pak ‘N Save as grocery options and would need to drive to Berkeley or Oakland to shop at a full-service supermarket.
New Seasons Market called off plans to open a 35,000 square-foot store in Emeryville just weeks before it was scheduled to open at Emeryville’s renovated Public Market in 2018.
After years of rumors about what would fill the sprawling anchor space on the mall’s ground floor, CenterCal announced in 2024 that the new tenant would be Japanese grocery chain Tokyo Central.
The grocer was established in 1965 as part of Marukai Corp. as one of the first international Japan-based retailers to set up operations in the United States. It’s now owned by Pan Pacific International Holdings, the Japanese retail group behind the Don Quijote discount chain, and now has 13 locations in California along with other brands in Hawaii.
The new market is part of a proliferation of ethnic grocers in North America. Some of these chains have grown with regional and national reach, leasing large spaces at malls, replacing big-box anchor tenants and occupying smaller locations like former Rite Aid sites.
The Bay Area has been an important market for growing Asian specialty supermarket chains that have helped breathe life back into the region’s retail economy since the COVID-19 pandemic slowed foot traffic and sent property values plummeting.
Lyndhurst, New Jersey-based H Mart, the nation’s biggest Asian grocery chain, is planning its biggest U.S. store, a new “multilevel prototype” featuring restaurants, a bar and a food hall as well as its massive supermarket in a shopping center in the northern Silicon Valley town of Fremont, California.
Last year’s opening of Jagalchi, a Korean megamarket named for the country’s largest seafood market, at the site of a shuttered JCPenney store in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, sparked a marked jump in foot traffic, according to tracking firm Placer.ai.
More than groceries
Tokyo Central is just the latest food concept to open at Bay Street Emeryville, a property that has added nearly a dozen new restaurants to its tenant roster in the past three years. The mall is now nearly fully occupied.
Some of the Asian supermarkets proliferating in the Bay Area have become known as much more than grocery stores. The Filipino supermarket chain Seafood City’s store in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, hosts “Late Night Madness” events with specialty food, live DJs, karaoke and dancing celebrating Filipino heritage.
Another Korean chain, Mega Mart, opened a few months ago in East Palo Alto. In addition to fresh baked goods and a large selection of Korean beauty products, it’s home to the first location of Pogu Picnic, a fast-casual restaurant from Jagalchi executive chef Tony Yoo, the first chef in Korea to win a Michelin star. Tokyo Central has 15 locations in the U.S.
The store features variety of items including luxury fruits such as giant Amaou strawberries that cost $19.99 for a pack of three, sashimi-grade fish that’s cut daily and a hot bar stocked with shrimp tempura, chicken katsu and Japanese baked sweet potatoes.
The chain is “not just a grocery store,” said CenterCal’s Wardy. “It’s really a destination and an exploration of the Japanese culture.”