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Special Report: Leon Marketplace - West New York, NJ

Leon Marketplace
Opened: September 4, 2026
Owner: unconfirmed; possibly Zariyeh and Siad families
Previous Tenants: none
Cooperative: Key Food Stores
Location: 4901 Bergenline Ave, West New York, NJ
Photographed: September 4, 2026
We return to Leon Marketplace in West New York to see that the roughly 10,000 square foot store has opened, in fact just yesterday morning. This is the first Leon Marketplace, but it's not the first store owned by this group nor the only Leon Marketplace in the works.
While I haven't been able to confirm this beyond a doubt, it looks like Leon Marketplace is connected to the Siad and Zariyeh families, who own a variety of supermarkets in New York City -- a handful of Fresh n Save Marketplaces, two Windsor Farms Markets, and a Key Food. This store is somewhat similar to that Key Food in its selection and general offerings, but has some notable differences. The selection of grab-and-go prepared foods in both stores is fairly vast for their relatively small sizes, and both have (gasp!) in-store bakeries, a rarity in these smaller, urban supermarkets. Leon Marketplace here has a much larger selection of Latin American foods, which is only logical given its location in one of the most-Hispanic areas on the east coast.
Still, Leon Marketplace has a slightly upscale lean, as evidenced by organic and specialty products throughout the store, though they're at much higher prices than big-chain supermarkets might have. But that's something very few of the mostly Latin-centric supermarkets along the Bergenline corridor lack. (For comparison, La Roca -- a Latino institution -- is about five blocks south, and both La Roca and Leon have lots of items the other one doesn't.)
Produce is in the front-left corner of the store, with a service butcher counter and packaged meats in the rest of the first aisle. Deli-bakery and prepared foods are in the back-left corner, with dairy winding around the back-right corner of the store and frozen in the last aisle on the right side.
The store is attractively designed, but I wasn't joking about those high prices on natural and organic items. Check out the organic asparagus for $10.19 a pound, compared to $6.49 a pound at the Whole Foods over in Weehawken, around a mile and a half away. It's $6.29 at the West New York Food Bazaar (half a mile northeast as the crow flies), both other places according to their websites. I'm going to make a safe guess and say no other supermarket in this immediate area carries organic asparagus. But meanwhile, other prices seemed completely normal.
There are a heck of a lot of supermarkets in the West New York/Union City/North Bergen area, but they're almost all very small. Super Supermarket, one block east and four blocks north, is only 7600 square feet. This store isn't that much larger, but has a lot more to offer and feels more like a mainstream supermarket than a neighborhood almost-bodega-sized supermarket.
Leon Marketplace is working on a slightly larger supermarket over in West Orange, which is a couple miles west of Newark. Since I made that post, the West Orange location has been given the green light for construction.
Dairy behind the meat department, still in the first aisle, and it kind of wraps around the back of the store into the last aisle. There's some playful Spanglish here in the "deli-ciosa" and panaderia. As mentioned, this grocery store does in fact have an in-store bakery -- something almost none of the other grocers around have, including the Food Bazaar that's almost three times the size of this store.
The setup is really attractive, and I hope the West Orange location looks as nice. High prices might be a bigger problem in West Orange, which is more suburban -- meaning the competition is larger, and more people have cars.
Because of the lower ceilings in some parts of this store, the aisle markers are attached to the sides of the aisles rather than hanging over them.
It's nice to see a sparkling-new, freshly-built supermarket on opening day like this, and Leon Marketplace definitely has a strong start here if not a perfect one. Check out the rest of this weekend's posts here!

Saturday

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