Drive west on Valley Ridge Boulevard past the Publix and you will eventually pass a second sign, newer and unbuilt, announcing something called The Hub at Nocatee. The name lands close enough to Marketplace at Nocatee, the shopping center you just drove through, that most residents assume it is phase two of the same project. It is not. One of these places has a working pharmacy drive-thru and a deli case full of imported cheese. The other is still a rendering with a handful of signed leases and a 2028 completion date attached to it.
That gap matters more than it sounds. Nocatee's own marketing archive has had to go back and correct itself on this exact point, appending an editor's note to an older post to clarify that the Publix everyone still calls "coming soon" actually opened its doors on November 15, 2025. About ten months later, some residents are still driving past a grocery store they think isn't open yet, while assuming a project that hasn't broken ground is close behind it.
The confusion, sorted by what's actually true
Here is the west side, in the order things are actually arriving rather than the order they were announced.
| Business or project | Status as of September 2026 | Confirmed timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Publix (Marketplace at Nocatee) | Open | Opened November 15, 2025 |
| SoFresh | Permitted, under construction | Targeted late summer 2026, no confirmed date yet |
| BODYBAR Pilates | Permitted, pre-selling memberships | Targeted Fall 2026 |
| Gate convenience store | Announced | No date set |
| The Nail Boutique Spa | Announced | No date set |
| Shores Fine Wine & Spirits | Land purchased | Late 2027 |
| The Hub at Nocatee | Pre-leasing, no tenants named | 2028 |
Six different businesses, six different stages of done, all filed under the same vague banner of "coming to the west side." That flattening is exactly what makes it hard to plan a Tuesday errand run around what's real.
What you can already walk into
The Publix at Marketplace at Nocatee is not a small addition. At 48,387 square feet, it became Nocatee's third Publix location, joining the two stores that already sit across from each other in the Town Center, one of which started life under the retired Greenwise Market label before being converted to a standard store. Publix's own newsroom marked the opening with a nod to the chain's 95th anniversary, handing commemorative reusable bags to the first 95 customers in line. The $14 million project sits on land Publix purchased for $6.66 million, and it now runs with a full pharmacy drive-thru and an adjoining Publix Liquors next door.
If your mental map of the west side still treats this as under construction, it has been open for the better part of a year. That is not a small planning error if you have been driving the extra distance to one of the Town Center stores out of habit.
The middle tier: permitted, dated, but not yet open
Two more tenants have pulled real building permits, which is a meaningfully different signal than a press release. SoFresh, which already runs locations in Ortega Park and Durbin Park, filed for a 1,373-square-foot build-out at 75 Irondale Road in April 2026, with RPC General Contractors of Atlantic Beach listed as the contractor and an estimated project cost of roughly $374,734. The company aimed for a late summer 2026 opening, but as of the most recent reporting available, there was still no confirmed grand opening date attached to that target. Late summer has technically come and gone. The date has not caught up to it yet.
BODYBAR Pilates is a step behind on the calendar but further ahead on marketing. Its permit for a 2,640-square-foot studio build-out, filed in April 2026 at an estimated cost of $297,000, points to a Fall 2026 opening, and the reformer-based studio, a sister location to BODYBAR Pilates Mandarin in Jacksonville, is locally owned by residents of Twenty Mile at Nocatee. The studio is already signing up Founding Members through its own site ahead of opening day, which is usually a sign a business expects to open on the timeline it announced rather than slip it.
A Gate convenience store is planned for the corner of Valley Ridge Boulevard and Burbank Avenue, right in front of Publix, and The Nail Boutique Spa has been announced as a full-service salon for the same center. Neither has a permit or opening window attached yet, which puts them a step behind SoFresh and BODYBAR in the queue even though all four get lumped into the same "Marketplace at Nocatee" news roundups.
The anchor that's furthest out but most concrete
Shores Fine Wine & Spirits is the one project on this list with a firm, distant date rather than a vague one. The company purchased a 2.35-acre parcel near Marketplace at Nocatee to build what it describes as its largest store to date, a 15,000-square-foot wine and cheese bar concept with an extensive beer, wine, spirits and cigar selection. The developer's own announcement puts the opening at late 2027. That is a specific date, which is more than most of this list has, but it is also more than a year further out than SoFresh or BODYBAR.
The Hub at Nocatee is not the same project
This is where the naming problem does the most damage. The Hub at Nocatee is a separate 63,225-square-foot development from Tampa-based Center Connect Development, announced in July 2026 and planned to sit adjacent to Publix, just west of Valley Ridge Boulevard South. It is designed around an open-air courtyard with weekend live music and dedicated golf cart parking, which sounds like an extension of Marketplace at Nocatee but is a distinct project with a distinct developer and a distinct timeline.
As of the leasing brochure Franklin Street's commercial team was circulating in July 2026, the project had four signed letters of intent, two restaurants, one service provider and one pet-related tenant, with three more letters out for signature and at least six more still in negotiation. Nineteen spaces remained available. No specific business names had been attached to any of it. The St. Johns River Water Management District was still reviewing an environmental permit for the 8.07-acre site at that point, which is an early-stage regulatory step, not a groundbreaking.
Center Connect's comparable projects in the Tampa area, The Hub at Bexley in Land O'Lakes and The Hub at Lexington Oaks in Wesley Chapel, give a rough preview of what the tenant mix might eventually look like: sports bars, ice cream shops, restaurants spanning Indian, Vietnamese and Caribbean cuisines, golf simulators, escape rooms, barbershops, nail salons, martial arts studios and pet grooming. None of that has been confirmed for the Nocatee version yet. The project is currently scheduled to open in 2028, which puts it a full two years past even the furthest-out project on the Marketplace at Nocatee side.
Why the timeline is worth tracking
Nocatee's west side is growing for a reason beyond retail announcements. A 312-unit multifamily development near the western interchange has already begun welcoming residents, adding several hundred new households within a short distance of Publix and whatever opens next. Momentum like that tends to accelerate leasing decisions on projects still in the letter-of-intent stage, which is worth watching if you're trying to guess whether The Hub's 2028 date holds or slips in either direction.
For now, the practical version of this story is simple. If someone tells you Publix on the west side just opened, they're behind by about ten months. If someone tells you The Hub at Nocatee is basically done, they're ahead by about two years. Everything else, SoFresh, BODYBAR, Shores, the Gate store, the nail salon, sits somewhere in between, each on its own permit and its own date, none of them interchangeable with the others just because they share a shopping center or a name.
If you're weighing what a fast-growing corner of Nocatee like this means for your own plans, whether you already live nearby or you're trying to time a move around it, Laura Worrell tracks these west-side changes as they happen, not as they're announced. Request a consultation to talk through what's actually built, what's actually dated, and what's still just a sign on Valley Ridge Boulevard.
