A six-building retail and restaurant plaza is moving through Pasco County's review process for the southwest corner of State Road 56 and Mansfield Boulevard, on a 59-acre parcel that has sat as open pasture for years. Developers submitted site plans starting June 19, and evidence in those filings points to The Fresh Market as the anchor grocery tenant, giving Wesley Chapel families a new specialty grocery option directly across from Pasco-Hernando State College.
The land sits within the Wiregrass Ranch Master Planned Unit Development and has been zoned for commercial use since 2007, the same year the nearby Shops at Wiregrass opened. County permits list Seth Lane, a vice president at Tampa-based Regency Centers, as the applicant. Regency has a long track record of building shopping centers anchored by The Fresh Market, and the proposed grocery footprint on the plans, 26,187 square feet, matches the chain's typical store size almost exactly.
The Fresh Market itself has not publicly announced a Wesley Chapel location, and county documents don't name the grocer outright. But between the developer's history with the chain and the size of the proposed space, the pieces line up.
What's planned so far
The overall property is expected to be split into 10 parcels and outparcels once fully built out, comparable in scale to the Shops at Wiregrass itself. So far, plans have been filed for three of them.
- Parcel D (7.65 acres): The Fresh Market plus 28 retail and restaurant suites ranging from 1,220 to 4,230 square feet, totaling 54,985 square feet of retail and 17,390 square feet of restaurant space
- Parcel B (4.10 acres): a 5,750-square-foot sit-down restaurant, an 8,000-square-foot sit-down restaurant, and a 3,075-square-foot fast-food restaurant with a drive-through
- Parcel A (2.88 acres): a 3,000-square-foot restaurant or office building and an 8,000-square-foot sit-down restaurant
No individual restaurant or retail tenants beyond The Fresh Market have been publicly identified for any of the three parcels. Seven additional outparcels, covering roughly 27 more acres, remain undeveloped and have no plans filed yet.
Why it's landing here
The Fresh Market is a smaller-format specialty grocer, known for premium meats, prepared foods, made-daily sushi and a wine selection, built around a boutique shopping experience rather than a one-stop weekly grocery run. Its stores run about half the size of a typical Publix. The closest existing Tampa Bay location sits near North Dale Mabry Highway and West Fletcher Avenue in Carrollwood, meaning this would be the chain's first foothold noticeably closer to Wesley Chapel.
The corner itself is no accident. It sits along State Road 56, which has become the county's busiest growth corridor, already carrying new apartments, a planned Walmart near Morris Bridge Road, and a Whole Foods-anchored plaza under construction at Bruce B. Downs Boulevard in Meadow Pointe. It's also a short drive from the newly opened Orlando Health Wiregrass Ranch Hospital, a roughly $300 million, 102-bed facility that brings hundreds of staff, patients and visitors through the area daily.
What happens next
The submitted plans now move through Pasco County's standard site-plan review, a process that can take months and often brings changes before final approval. No construction timeline or opening date has been set. County notices and permit updates are the next signal to watch for, along with any additional filings on the seven remaining outparcels that would round out the center. The Fresh Market has not confirmed the location publicly, and there's no indication yet of when that might change.
Have a tip on what's happening near SR 56 or want to talk about what stores you'd like to see fill in the rest of the plaza? Head over to our Community Forum to join the conversation, and keep up with more business development stories from around Wesley Chapel. For daily updates, follow the Wesley Chapel Community Website on Facebook, Instagram, and X, or visit us anytime at wesleychapelcommunity.com.
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