H-E-B breaks ground on second Dallas Joe V’s Smart Shop

H-E-B started construction Wednesday on its Joe V’s Smart Shop with a target opening date of next summer. The property, on the southwest corner of the intersection of Buckner and Samuell boulevards, is across from a Walmart Supercenter and a Sam’s Club.

The 55,000-square-foot value-priced grocery store focused on fresh foods will start hiring later this year and will employ more than 200 people from the surrounding neighborhoods, said Roxanne Orsak, H-E-B chief operating officer and creator of the Joe V’s format.

The store is expected to draw shoppers from southeast Dallas and the neighborhoods of Buckner Terrace, Pleasant Grove and Bruton Terrace along with western Mesquite.

Joe V’s operates 10 stores in the Houston market where the first store opened in 2010. Another southern Dallas Joe V’s Smart Shop will open this summer at 4101 W. Wheatland Road.

“We offer the lowest prices in the market for 14 years and when we open in Dallas we’ll do that here as well,” Orsak said Wednesday at a groundbreaking where the Skyline High School jazz band warmed up the crowd.

Dallas City Council member Adam Bazaldua, of District 7 where the Joe V’s is being built, said he went to Houston to see a Joe V’s when residents of the Dallas neighborhood wondered why they were not getting an H-E-B.

“The store exceeded my expectations. It blew me away,” Bazaldua said. He lives in Buckner Terrace, a neighborhood that borders the property. He still hears the H-E-B question from residents, he said, “but now I have my personal experience to share with them.”

Bazaldua said one of the first things he did when he was elected to the City Council in 2019 was to ask to meet with H-E-B officials. He knew they had owned the 11-acre parcel where the store is being built.

“I asked them if they needed incentives because the district had some discretionary funds, but they declined it,” Bazaldua said. “They do these things on their own timeline and with their own funds.”

The store is going to earn the trust of area residents with its “quality fresh produce, low prices and H-E-B hospitality,” said Stephen Butt, H-E-B board member, and president of shareholder relations and the company’s Dallas-based Central Market division.

Joe V’s Smart Shop announced gifts that total $30,000 to area schools and nonprofits with $10,000 each going to support Buckner International, Skyline High School in Dallas and Frank Guzick Elementary in Dallas.

A new Joe V’s format was created for the Dallas expansion with fresh foods at the entrance rather than a wall of deals such as canned vegetables stacked high in the older stores.

The first new concept opened in Katy, west of Houston, with $4 cheese pizza to take home and bake at the entrance along with H-E-B’s sushi partner Sushiya, an Asian grill and prepared meals.

Joe V’s stores have in-store meat cutters and a bakery that makes the same fresh tortillas that H-E-B is known for, Orsak said. Since the first Joe V’s opened, bolillo rolls made daily in the bakery have been priced at 8 for $1.

“And that’s never changing as long as I’m around,” Orsak said.

X: @MariaHalkias

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