Mario Minor arrived in West Baltimore boasting of big plans to build a grocery store in a food desert.

And not just any store. His Market Fresh Gourmet would cover all of Poppleton’s grocery needs — from a butcher to prepared foods — at affordable prices. It would offer health screenings, cooking classes and delivery services, ensuring healthy food for all its neighbors.

Minor seemed just the man to deliver. For about seven years, the Prince George’s County businessman has promoted himself as an experienced grocer with deep ties to the industry. There would be five Market Fresh sites in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, he said. A trade publication called him a health hero. Politicians applauded him.

But Minor has never opened a grocery store. Anywhere. And his projects have stalled. Everywhere.

A Market Fresh store has been “coming soon” for seven years in Capitol Heights, but it doesn’t have a lease. In Petersburg, Virginia, where Minor claimed last year that his store was the preferred anchor for a new development, officials were stunned and quickly disputed the notion.

Here in Baltimore, investors sank $5.7 million into his vision, and in May, state lawmakers pledged $500,000 of taxpayer money for the Poppleton Market Fresh. In a 2023 presentation to top city officials, Minor projected annual profits of $2 million.

Yet the 8,000-square-foot site has sat empty for four years. Posters on the outside of the store advertising bread “fresh-baked daily” are torn and faded. A QR code for job applicants leads to a website that says “Opening 2024.”

The ghost grocery store of Poppleton fits a larger pattern for this struggling West Baltimore neighborhood. Two decades ago, the city awarded New York-based La Cité Development the exclusive rights to transform 14 acres of the neighborhood into a glitzy, upscale residential area. Blocks of it remain undeveloped, and there’s no new retail.

A grocery store was supposed to help anchor La Cite’s apartment complex, the only phase of development that has been completed. Frustrated by the stalled development, Poppleton residents and the city have been trying to wrest control of the neighborhood from La Cité.

Now La Cité finds itself in a similar situation with Market Fresh.

The New York developer sued Market Fresh last month in Baltimore City District Court, seeking to recoup $686,000 in allegedly unpaid rent going back two years. Separately, a Baltimore County judge ordered Market Fresh, and Minor personally, to pay more than $300,000 to a contractor who sued for unpaid construction services. Minor avoided seven attempts to be served court papers in that case, records show.

La Cité did not respond to requests for comment.

Minor didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, but he bristled when approached by a Baltimore Banner reporter at a recent hearing on the construction services lawsuit.

“What you’re doing is not cool,” he said.

The perfect messenger

Most Poppleton residents do not have a car. The city considers the area a food desert because the nearest grocery store is more than a quarter-mile away, and household incomes are low.

Minor often has said in public speeches reviewed by The Banner that he knows what it’s like to live in a food desert. Growing up in Prince George’s County, Minor said, he was surrounded by fast food and minimarts with sugary drinks and little access to fresh, healthy food.

Minor, 57, said it wasn’t until he suffered two heart attacks and got diagnosed with leukemia in 2015 that he realized the importance of diet.

God was calling him to feed people, particularly in Black communities deprived of fresh produce, Minor said in a 2022 YouTube interview, and that meant starting a chain of grocery stores.

A former concert promoter, Minor shares ownership of the Market Fresh Gourmet group with colleagues from his time managing the liquor store at the Potomac Gourmet Market at the National Harbor, according to business records.

In 2013, he became an assistant secretary of Potomac Gourmet, records show, an experience that Minor said taught him about running a grocery store. He has said in media interviews that the market is the first grocery store he operated. Liquor license filings show Minor had a minority ownership stake and was never the operator. The market closed in 2021.

Minor and Potomac Gourmet colleagues also had a license to wholesale and distribute alcohol through an entity called Comm Worldwide International Inc., according to a U.S. Treasury Department database.

In December 2017, Comm Worldwide held a party to promote rapper Drake’s whiskey, calling itself the exclusive East Coast distributor of Virginia Black. Photos from the event posted to Facebook show Minor alongside Maryland Del. Diana Fennell and Wanda Durant, the mother of NBA star Kevin Durant. Comm Worldwide’s Facebook page and website list Fennell and Wanda Durant as part owners.

Fennell did not respond to requests for comment. Wanda Durant said she knew Minor but declined to answer questions.

Market Fresh is born

In 2018, Minor and others with Comm Worldwide came to Baltimore to tour the development site in Poppleton, according to photos posted to social media.

La Cité was finishing the first phase of its project in the neighborhood, a 262-unit, two-building apartment complex.

That November, La Cité’s president, Dan Bythewood Jr., held a ribbon-cutting for the project and told the crowd he wanted to bring a grocery store to the neighborhood. Minor stood and applauded.

The Instagram page for Market Fresh posted a photo in February 2020 of Minor and Bythewood in Poppleton. The caption said its “second location at @centerwestbaltimore is well under way.”

There was no first location open.

Bythewood and Minor formalized their agreement for the Poppleton store. Mayor Brandon Scott‘s March 2021 press release about it said the store was expected to open that year. Market Fresh lined up $5.7 million in financing from Arctaris Impact Investors — which also put $13 million into a separate La Cité project in Poppleton that hasn’t materialized.

Arctaris declined to comment.

Minor and his Market Fresh team began trying to weave themselves into the community fabric. At a September 2021 neighborhood meeting, Minor soothed neighbors anxious to see movement on a store. “We are Poppleton,” he said, asking for their trust and patience.

That October, Minor and others in Market Fresh shirts handed out store merchandise at a neighborhood 5K race.

By December, Market Fresh was pushing back its opening to spring 2022 — and still on the hunt for more financing, according to emails among employees of the Baltimore Development Corp., the city’s economic development arm. BDC has been working to bring more grocers to the city.

Prince George’s promises

About 40 miles to the south, Minor’s Prince George’s County Market Fresh was supposed to be even further along.

Construction began in 2019 at its space in the Hampton Park shopping center in Capitol Heights, another food desert.

Over the next year, Minor and his team participated in food distributions to introduce residents to the Market Fresh brand. He won a community award for preparing grab-and-go meals for seniors.

A 2021 ribbon-cutting for what was billed as the Market Fresh headquarters, at the Prince George’s County Chamber of Commerce, attracted local dignitaries who were excited about the store opening nearby.

“I hear residents, I have to tell you, so often say, ‘What about us? You have forgotten us and the grocer that was promised,’” then-Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks said.

Minor talked big at the ceremony. He’d buy and distribute enough fresh produce to build new wealth for local farmers. He’d work with Prince George’s Community College to hire chefs from its culinary school. He’d hire 70 people, providing good benefits to all of them.

Throughout the event, Alsobrooks and other officials repeatedly referred to Minor as “Dr. Minor,” though The Banner was unable to find publicly available information showing Minor has a doctoral degree.

On his Facebook page, Minor writes of a friendship with Alsobrooks, now a U.S. senator. They’re not friends, according to Alsobrooks’ spokesperson.

Three and a half years later, the Capitol Heights store hasn’t opened.

The space was designed with Market Fresh in mind, but it never moved in and a brokerage team for Velocity Capital never stopped searching for other tenants, said Veronica Jeon, a spokesperson for Velocity, which operates as landlord of the $140 million Hampton Park development.

Market Fresh signed a lease for the store but it has since expired, Jeon said.

With the work in Prince George’s County still unfinished, Minor popped up in Virginia in April 2024 to announce at a town hall that Market Fresh would anchor a $45 million development known as Sycamore Grove, also in a food desert.

This would be the third Market Fresh in a growing chain, he told the audience.

But after that town hall city officials disputed Minor’s claims, saying “no such decision had been made,” according to the Progress-Index.

Market Fresh also made a play in Washington, where Minor and his team vied for a shuttered market in Southwest D.C. in May 2023 — saying they had store locations serving Maryland food deserts.

Poppleton waits

By spring 2023, the Baltimore Development Corp. officials who had helped Market Fresh Gourmet find funding, and the community itself, were growing irritated, emails reviewed by The Banner show.

“Also can someone let me know what is going on with Fresh Gourmet? Is it still opening soon?” BDC’s then-president and CEO, Colin Tarbert, wrote in a May 15, 2023, email.

In a June 2023 email to Market Fresh, Denice Ko, an attorney for the Poppleton community, lamented the lack of communication between the grocer and the neighborhood. She wrote that she had spent six months waiting for Market Fresh to respond to questions about a liquor license, which an attorney for the store had said was critical to securing overall financing.

“The very long delay in your clients response not just in the MOU negotiation but just no communication at all created a lot of mistrust to be frank,” Ko wrote.

Residents have not heard from Minor since. Years have passed with seemingly no progress on the site.

“It’s not just about another option for people,” Poppleton resident Tisha Guthrie said last year. “This would change people’s daily life.”

The $500,000 state award has not been disbursed to Market Fresh, according to the Neighborhood Impact Investment Fund, the organization chosen by lawmakers to oversee that money.

Last year, a Baltimore County judge ordered Minor to pay $307,000 to Shaw Electric, a subcontractor in Dundalk, for construction at the Poppleton site. Minor did not pay the judgment, court records show.

This year, Shaw Electric asked a judge to hold Minor in contempt of court for failing to pay the judgment.

At a July 3 hearing in that case, Minor sat on a bench in the courtroom. It was the first time Howard Stevens, Shaw Electric’s attorney, had seen Minor in person.

The judgment in favor of Stevens’ client is still accruing interest, and there’s another hearing set for late next month.

“There’s a lot of promises he’s made for funding that may or may not exist,” Stevens said in an interview.

Minor, after saying it was “not cool,” that a reporter approached him, declined to answer questions.

“I believe you have all the statements you need,” he said.