Two bakery chains moving to the same corner

Two national bakery cafes will open next door to one another on the southeast corner of North Wilmot Road and East Broadway.

Only a driveway will separate Kneaders Bakery & Café from Corner Bakery Café on the corner that was once home to El Mercado shopping center. The retail development was leveled in spring 2013 to make way for a CVS store.

The two restaurants, part of national chains, will be joined by a third national chain, Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, which the franchisee said he plans to open by next August on the Broadway side of the corner lot.

Rick Borane,a senior associate broker for Tucson’s Volk Co., said he’s heard of restaurants with identical concepts clustering near retail shopping centers — Park Place mall is a couple blocks up East Broadway. But he’s never heard of competing restaurants planting themselves right on top of one another.

“This is a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing,” said Borane, who said his company sold the retail pad to the Corner Bakery franchise operator without knowing that Kneaders was moving next door.

The Corner Bakery sale closed three weeks ago, which was when the Utah-based Kneaders’ franchisee Four Foods Group first learned of the situation. Four Foods is in the process of closing its land sale next door, said the company’s entitlement manager, Austin Smith.

Both Kneaders and Corner Bakery plan to move forward with their Tucson plans. Corner Bakery officials were not available to comment.

Smith, whose company has the Kneaders franchise rights for Arizona, Nevada, Utah and Colorado, said his company hopes to break ground as early as January and be open by May.

The Broadway/Wilmot restaurant will be one of several that the group plans to eventually open in the greater Tucson area including locations in Oro Valley and Marana, Smith said.

“We currently have five locations in Phoenix and another two that are currently under construction,” he said.

That would add to the company’s portfolio of 24 restaurants; next year, it plans to open another 12 to 15 restaurants, Smith said.

The first Kneaders Bakery & Café opened in Orem, Utah, in 1997 and quickly gained a following for its old world European-style artisan breads baked twice daily. The company began opening additional locations before bringing in Four Foods Group to franchise the restaurants outside Utah. Today there are 32 locations.

In addition to the five Phoenix-area restaurants, there are two in Yuma that are not affiliated with Smith’s company.

Corner Bakery Café also has a reputation for scratch-made breads, soups, desserts, sandwiches and salads. Its first restaurant opened on a downtown Chicago street corner in 1991 but it wasn’t until 2006 that the company started accepting franchises. Today there are more than 160 locations nationwide including in Dallas, Baltimore, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and northern California.

Corner Bakery has two Phoenix locations and a Scottsdale location coming soon.

On the Broadway side of the Wilmot corner, an outpost of Baton Rouge, Louisiana-born Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers is expected to open by August.

Las Vegas-based franchise operator MRG Marketing & Management will build the 3,500-square-foot restaurant that will seat around 100. It will have a University of Arizona theme to it with sports paraphernalia and photos on the walls, said MRG’s President and CEO Justin Micatrotto.

MRG, which has the Raising Cane’s franchise rights for Arizona, California and Nevada, opened its first Arizona restaurant in Phoenix three years ago. It is already up to seven locations.

“It has been off the charts,” Micatrotto said. “When we looked at Arizona as a whole, Tucson was definitely on the radar. We wanted to get that base and core going on in Phoenix.”

Raising Cane’s has five items on its menu: chicken fingers, crinkle-cut fries, Texas toast, coleslaw and the house special Cane Sauce.

“A lot of people have called us the In ‘N Out of chicken fingers,” he said.

MRG has plans to open at least two Tucson locations. The second would be closer to the University of Arizona, Micatrotto said.

Raising Cane’s founder Todd Graves opened his first restaurant in Baton Rouge in 1996. Within seven years it had grown to 50 locations, most of them in Graves’ native Louisiana. Today there are more than 150 Raising Cane’s locations in 15 states.