For most of the last decade, life at SweetBay meant driving out of SweetBay. Coffee runs, grocery trips, Saturday errands, the shoe store before a half-marathon in the fall. The community had trails and porches and neighbors, but the routines that fill an actual week happened on 23rd Street or Highway 77.
Phase 1 of the Town Center changed that math. What opened in 2025 is small enough to walk in an afternoon and specific enough to reroute a resident's whole Saturday. This is a look at what that core actually contains right now, what's landing in the next few months, and how the boardwalk trails already stitch it into the rest of the neighborhood.
What Phase 1 actually anchored
The scale is worth pinning down before the tenant list. The SweetBay Town Center opened its first phase in 2025 with roughly 17,000 square feet of in-line retail and restaurant space wrapped around a 48,387-square-foot Publix and a 2,100-square-foot Publix Liquors. That's the anchor tenant equation. Everything else in Phase 1 is boutique-sized space filling the wings.
Three tenants define the current character of the block:
- Publix. A full-size store, not a coastal express format. It carries the same catering, pharmacy, and prepared-foods lines you'd expect from a suburban Publix, which is the point. Residents no longer plan a Publix trip around traffic on SR 390.
- Starbucks. A drive-thru and walk-in unit inside the Town Center. The relevant detail for residents isn't the menu, it's that it's close enough to fold into a morning walk instead of a car trip.
- Fleet Feet. The running store held its grand opening in the summer of 2025 and offers a 3D foot scan for shoe fittings. It partners with the Panama City Run Club, which means the store also functions as a meet-up point for group runs rather than just a retail counter.
The rest of Phase 1 fills in with a nail salon and a shipping center, both useful in the "errand you'd otherwise drive across town for" category.
The tenants shaping the next six months
The more interesting story is the wave that's still landing. Panama City Commissioner Brian Grainger, speaking to WMBB about the Town Center's tenant pipeline, framed the arriving group as the shift from convenience anchor to a food scene. Three names have been confirmed as moving in over the coming months:
- A Mediterranean restaurant taking one of the in-line bays.
- An Italian ice shop, the first dessert-only concept in the center.
- Pana Roma Pizza, a sit-down pizza operator.
That trio matters because it fills the gap Phase 1 didn't. Coffee in the morning and groceries at noon are covered. A weekday dinner that isn't a drive to Beck Avenue or 23rd Street wasn't, and now it will be.
Beyond food, the site plan tells you where the center is headed structurally. Phase 2 is a 3.65-acre parcel programmed for additional retail and restaurant space. Phase 3 is a 2.43-acre hotel pad. Phase 4 is 5.59 acres for office and medical office use. Add the planned marina at the end of SweetBay Boulevard, with a two-acre basin and 56,000 square feet of dry storage, and the buildout stops looking like a shopping center and starts looking like a small downtown with a working waterfront.
"SweetBay as a whole sets an example for the state of Florida on what a master plan community can look like." — Panama City Commissioner Brian Grainger, in comments to WMBB about the Town Center's growth
For anyone who bought in the earliest phases of SweetBay, that's the ambient change worth registering. The community was sold on the promise of walkability. Phase 1 delivered a first version of it. Phases 2 through 4 turn walkability into a full daily loop.
A Saturday that never leaves the boardwalk
The most useful thing a resident can do with Phase 1 is stop treating it as a destination and start treating it as one stop in a longer walk. A representative Saturday, using only what already exists in the neighborhood:
- 7:30 a.m. Coffee at Starbucks, walked to, not driven to.
- 8:00 a.m. Group run out of Fleet Feet with the Panama City Run Club, following the salt-marsh boardwalk loop.
- 9:30 a.m. Cool-down on the boardwalk through Sweetbay Wetlands, the nature park at Michigan Avenue and 19th Street with a boardwalk that meanders through wooded wetlands. The City of Panama City lists it as a public park, which matters because the trail system is open beyond the private amenity gates.
- 10:00 a.m. Publix run for the week, plus prepared foods for lunch on the porch.
- Late afternoon. Loop back through Chickadee Park with kids, or Veranda for open lawn, or Kestrel Park for the pool and sports court.
- Evening. Once Pana Roma opens, dinner without starting the car.
None of that is aspirational. The infrastructure is in place. What Phase 1 added is the two anchors, groceries and coffee, that make the sequence hold together instead of falling apart into a series of car trips.
Where Academy Park fits on the calendar
Academy Park is the community's designated events space, and it's where SweetBay's public-facing programming lives. Two recurring items are worth putting on a resident's calendar:
The Notes of Fall concert series, presented by CBC Construction, runs six weeks in the fall and rotates artists across genres. It's free and staged at Academy Park. For residents, the useful framing is that it turns six Thursday or Friday evenings into a default plan without requiring a reservation or a drive.
The Spring Market is the other tentpole, a sunset shopping evening with local vendors, food, and live entertainment. Between the two, plus one-off launches like the Hutchinson model home open house on Buttonsage Avenue, Academy Park hosts something roughly monthly during the peak seasons.
The reason to name these specifically isn't the events themselves. It's that Academy Park sits within walking distance of both the Town Center and the residential core, which means "going to a concert" and "grabbing dinner beforehand" now share a single loop rather than a car trip in between.
The trails as connective tissue
The piece most residents already know but most guides underprice is the trail network. SweetBay sits along more than five miles of bayfront shoreline, and the community includes over five miles of nature trails winding through preserved wetlands and coastal forest. Those two numbers overlap in places, and together they explain why the Town Center works the way it does.
A shopping center on its own is a car destination. A shopping center connected to a boardwalk that connects to four parks and a wetlands trail is a walking destination. The trails were built before the retail. They're the reason Phase 1 didn't need a parking-lot moat around it to function.
If you moved into an early phase of SweetBay expecting the master plan to eventually deliver on its walkability pitch, this is the point where it started to. If you're a longer-tenured resident who watched the vacant runway sit vacant, the useful update is that the runway is now a streetscape with a coffee shop, a grocer, a running store, and three restaurants queued up behind them.
What to watch next
Two specific milestones will tell you how fast the next chapter arrives:
- The Pana Roma, Mediterranean, and Italian ice openings. These are the tenants that move the Town Center from convenience to evening use. Watch the storefronts along the Publix wing.
- Marina groundbreaking. The signalized intersection at SweetBay Avenue and SR 390 is nearly complete, which is the prerequisite for the marina work to begin in earnest. A two-acre basin and 56,000 square feet of dry storage is a different neighborhood than the one that exists today.
Phase 1 is the version of SweetBay most residents are now living in. Phase 2 through 4, plus the marina, are the version of SweetBay that closes the loop on the original pitch. The distance between the two is shorter than it looks from a porch.
If you're thinking about what your SweetBay home is worth in a market where the Town Center is now an amenity rather than a promise, or you're weighing a move into the community while Phase 2 is still pre-lease and pricing reflects it, the team at Think Real Estate lives and works in this market every day. Contact a Local Expert to talk through what the buildout means for your street specifically.
