The Downtown ShopRite Moved Upstairs. What Changes About the Weekly Grocery Run?

On October 14, 2026, the ShopRite of Metro Plaza at 400 Marin Boulevard handed off to a new store across the street. The ShopRite of Hudson Exchange Place opened its doors at 7 a.m. and held a ribbon-cutting at 9 a.m. It is an 85,000-square-foot supermarket on the second floor of Everton, a new 60-story residential tower at 99 Provost Street.

Along with the new address and the bigger floor plate, the order of openings changed. In Everton, the supermarket came first. The store opened before the tower above it and before the planned ground-floor tenants, and the larger plan around both is still to come. Anyone who shops Downtown is now using the first finished piece of Hudson Exchange's second phase.

A supermarket that opened before its own building

NJBIZ reported that Everton opened the day after Inserra Supermarkets opened the ShopRite. The tower has 802 market-rate apartments and sits next to the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail. The project broke ground in 2023 and is the second phase of Hudson Exchange, which NJBIZ describes as an 18-acre development by BGRE, the company formerly known as Brookfield Properties, and G&S Investors.

That order was deliberate. At the opening, G&S Investors principal Abe Naparstek told Jersey Digs:

"This project delivers on our long-standing commitment that ShopRite, an essential amenity for downtown Jersey City, stays open for generations to come."

Planning coverage from 2022 said the old store would close once the new one opened. Downtown kept one supermarket the whole time. It simply moved across Provost Street and up one level.

The trip now goes up a floor

The old Metro Plaza store was a one-story building at street level. The new one is a floor up, and the building is set up to move people and carts there. Wakefern's announcement lists three escalators, four passenger elevators and two cart movers.

Drivers get a new system too. Parking is ticketless, runs through a mobile app, and is spread over two parking decks.

The store also has Caper Carts, ShopRite's smart shopping carts. Hours are 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day.

For someone walking over from Paulus Hook or Van Vorst Park, the route ends differently. There is now an escalator or elevator between the sidewalk and the produce section, plus cart movers that bring a full cart back down.

What 20,000 extra square feet holds

The new store is 20,000 square feet larger than the Metro Plaza location it replaced. According to Supermarket News, most of that space goes to fresh food and prepared meals:

• Patsy's Butcher Shop, one of Inserra's own brands
• Antoinette's Kitchen, serving freshly prepared meals plus a hot bar and a soup bar
• A sushi bar and a full-service deli
• A bake shop, a produce department and a seafood department
• Fresh to Table, with grab-and-go, ready-to-cook and ready-to-heat meals

Two features aren't about food on the shelf. Customers can see a registered dietitian and get nutrition counseling in the store. The store also has a liquor store, so wine and spirits are in the same trip.

The building systems are new as well. Inserra says the refrigeration system cuts the store's carbon footprint in half. It also says EcoVision glass doors and EcoShine LED lighting reduce energy use by more than 80%. The opening tastings ran October 14 through 18, with a Singing Mozzarella Chef on the last two days.

The ground floor is the next layer

The supermarket takes up the second floor. Below it, Everton has 19,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. NJBIZ's opening coverage named the tenants planned for that space, and each would give the block a reason to visit besides groceries.

Modcup's story ties the new tower to the old Downtown. Jersey Digs reported that the company began in 2013 as a single mobile coffee cart in Hoboken. Founder Travas Clifton later bought a 1969 Citroën coffee truck and parked it in Exchange Place. Its first brick-and-mortar café is on Palisade Avenue in The Heights. It also has a café on 4th Street in Hoboken and currently roasts at 25 Senate Place. The Everton space is where Clifton plans to grow the roasting operation. He told Jersey Digs the new location will let Modcup "compete with the world's best roasters while staying deeply rooted in Jersey City, the place that shaped us." The company's "Caffeine and Dreams" sign is part of the plan for the building.

If all three tenants open as planned, one stop at 99 Provost Street could cover coffee, the swim school and dinner, with the grocery run one floor up.

Across Provost Street, the plan keeps going

Everton is the second phase. The first is VYV North and VYV South, two 36-story buildings with 850 residences, 20,000 square feet of retail and 450 parking spaces. Everton's own plans include more than 20,000 square feet of publicly accessible green space along Marin Boulevard, with plazas and a dog park. That dog park is separate from the outdoor dog run listed among Everton's resident amenities.

When the tower was proposed in 2022, Jersey Digs reported plans for a plaza at the site's northwest corner, meant as a gateway to the Sixth Street Embankment.

The old Metro Plaza store at 400 Marin Boulevard is part of the larger picture. The full Hudson Exchange plan calls for six million square feet of development and 5,500 homes. It also includes a central park and new roads that would reconnect the historic street grid. The master plan by Beyer Blinder Belle shows seven redeveloped parcels around that central green. In that plan, the low-rise store and surface lot Downtown shopped at for years are one parcel among several, and the supermarket that used to stand there has already moved into the newest finished tower.

The next grocery run starts at 99 Provost Street, any day between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m., with the escalators or elevators up to the second floor.

Watching a new anchor like this ShopRite come together block by block is part of how Jessica Williams follows the Downtown waterfront, from the first store that opens to the last parcel on the master plan. If you'd like to talk about how Hudson Exchange's next phases fit your plans, contact Jessica for a private consultation.