Viengchan Market, a family-owned Southeast Asian grocery store, opened Wednesday in the site of the former Cooper’s Foods on West Seventh Street in St. Paul.
The store has another location in Brooklyn Park, which opened in 2016.
Viengchan Market, a Southeast Asian grocery store that opened in Dec. 2024 on West Seventh Street, stocks a variety of pan-Asian groceries including Lao, Hmong and Thai ingredients, fresh produce and deli items. (Jared Kaufman / Pioneer Press)
In St. Paul, Viengchan Market opens at 9 a.m. daily and closes at 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 6 p.m. Sunday. The store offers a variety of pan-Asian groceries including Lao, Hmong and Thai ingredients, fresh produce and deli items, as well as continuing to offer many of the American staple ingredients stocked at Cooper’s.
“Lots of people have been coming in,” Herder Her, who manages the store’s IT systems, said at the store Thursday morning. “We were in Brooklyn Park and knew there were more Asian people in the St. Paul area, so we knew we wanted to expand here.”
Viengchan’s owners bought the 18,000 square-foot building in St. Paul from the Cooper family in spring 2024 and briefly leased it back for Cooper’s Foods’ closing sale, according to previous Pioneer Press reporting.
The Cooper’s Foods store near the corner of West Seventh and St. Clair Avenue, open since the 1990s, had been the local chain’s final location and closed in June. The family closed its 107-year-old Chaska location in March and a previous location in Highland Park in 2017.
With limited grocery options in the neighborhood — other stores like Lunds & Byerlys, Mississippi Market and Trader Joe’s are all over a mile away — residents had previously expressed concern over Cooper’s closure, and relief that the building would remain a source for fresh produce and ingredients.
“I think it’s really important that the community has access to fresh and affordable food,” Meg Duhr, board president with the West Seventh/Fort Road Federation, told the Pioneer Press in June. “I hope it’s successful. Without that, West Seventh is really kind of a food desert.”
Viengchan Market: 633 W. 7th St.; viengchanmarket.com; Brooklyn Park location phone is 763-566-4489
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