Whole Foods to open Holbrook store at The Shops at SunVet in March

Whole Foods Market’s new store at The Shops at SunVet will open next month as the $93 million redevelopment of the Holbrook retail site winds down.

Whole Foods Market will open its full-service store at the shopping center March 5, according to a statement from the Austin, Texas-based retailer.

The 40,000-square-foot supermarket will be the largest tenant on the property, which was formerly called Sun Vet Mall.

The Holbrook supermarket — Whole Foods’ eighth store on Long Island — will include a prepared food department with hot items and a salad bar, a bakery, a specialty department dedicated to cheesemakers and artisan producers, 290 craft beers and ciders, and meat and seafood counters, Whole Foods said.

Located at 5801 Sunrise Hwy., near the Veterans Memorial Highway intersection, the retail center has undergone a redevelopment to transform it from a struggling, enclosed mall to an open-air shopping center with a more upscale mix of tenants.

In 2023, demolition work started on the project, which reduced the size of the retail space to 168,000 square feet from 282,000 square feet.

The shopping center’s two largest buildings were created using some of the existing mall structure. Six new, smaller outparcels were being built around the two largest buildings.

The shopping center is now 93% leased and construction is mostly complete, except for buildouts by tenants, Rebecca Wing, vice president of investments at Regency Centers Corp., told Newsday in an email. Regency is the Jacksonville, Florida-based real estate investment trust that is the lead partner in the redevelopment.

Citibank is the only remaining tenant that remains from before the alteration but it has moved to a new freestanding building.

The center's new tenants include Nordstrom Rack, Wonder, Hand & Stone, Teachers Federal Credit Union, Wells Fargo and Starbucks.

Check back for updates on this developing story.

By Tory N. Parrish

tory.parrish@newsday.comToryParrish1

Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.