Vacant Ceres Kmart finds new life, brings popular chicken chain to Stanislaus County
After three years of sitting empty and becoming an eyesore at the base of Ceres’ Hatch Road shopping district, the old Kmart building is set to bring new life and new chains to the city.
Monday night, the Ceres Planning Commission unanimously approved plans to develop the 9-acre site at the northeast corner of Hatch Road and Herndon Avenue, which will find a new purpose for the massive 84,000-square-foot building as well as bring multiple new businesses into the area.
The existing Kmart building will be renovated into a Public Storage self-storage facility. The development project also will construct a Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers restaurant, Dutch Bros Coffee kiosk and Quik Stop convenience store/gas station at the front of the property along Hatch Road.
The Raising Cane’s will be the first location in Stanislaus County for the Louisiana-based fast-food fried chicken franchise. First opened in 1996 in Baton Rouge, the chain specializes in fried chicken fingers. The company has been expanding despite the pandemic and now has more than 500 locations nationwide, including in Clovis and Manteca.
The 3,260-square-foot restaurant is slated to be constructed directly in front of the current Kmart, fronting Hatch. A Raising Cane’s corporate representative said if all goes according to plan, the Ceres site will open in 2023.
In addition to Raising Cane’s, another Dutch Bros Coffee drive-thru kiosk will be built on the site. The Oregon-based coffee chain has been expanding rapidly in Stanislaus County, with two locations in Modesto, one in Oakdale and soon two in Turlock.
The 950-square-foot coffee kiosk will be on the northwest side of the development, directly to the west of the existing Kmart building. The site will be the first for the chain in Ceres, and sixth overall in Stanislaus County since it first opened in the area in summer 2019.
The 5,800-square-foot Quik Stop combination gas station and convenience store will be built on the development’s southwest corner, directly across the street from the Starbucks on Herndon Road. The new gas station will add to the busy Highway 99 exit area’s fueling choices, which already include a Chevron and a newly remodeled 7-Eleven.
The Public Storage facility is set to utilize the existing Kmart building, as well as expand and construct additional storage on site to increase the building area to some 116,000 square feet.
The project also creates pads for potentially two more businesses on the property, including a 2,500-square-foot restaurant with drive-thru and a 1,500 square-foot oil change shop. Neither tenant for the additional remaining lots has been finalized.
The development plans were recommended by city of Ceres staff, but did draw some concern from a few residents who spoke during the public comment period of the Planning Commission meeting. A handful of people who live near the project said they are worried about increased traffic, noise and lights at night. Another criticized the repurposing of the former shopping space into a self-storage facility.
Representatives from the project’s developer, Phoenix-based Evergreen Devco, were on hand at the meeting to assuage fears. They also reconfirmed what anyone who’s been paying attention to today’s retail landscape knows: It’s really hard finding new tenants for those empty big-box store buildings right now.
Rogg Collins, a principal with Evergreen Devco, said the company has been working on the development for over a year. It initially tried to bring in more retail and shopping-oriented clients, including the Sprouts specialty grocery chain, which has had a store in Modesto’s McHenry Village since 2012. But the company passed on the site after seeing the property.
Collins went on to call the big empty husk of the former Kmart “a little bit obsolete” from a retail perspective. The building, now 45 years old, was completed for Kmart in 1976, and the retailer was its sole tenant for the past four decades.
“The big-box retailers in COVID just weren’t doing deals. They are starting to shrink, they’re not expanding,” Collins said. “We went into this with the idea of re-tenanting an 84,000-square-foot building, and the demand just wasn’t there. The demand was to be on the street, on Hatch Road.”
Ceres Senior Planner James Michaels said staff wouldn’t have recommended approving the storage development deal if there wasn’t additional commercial uses added to the site. Those will bring new retailers to the area as well as more sales tax revenue along the Hatch Road shopping corridor, he said.
This story was originally published October 20, 2021 at 6:36 AM.
