Super Mercado Owner Continues Family Tradition

Cleanliness, friendliness and quality: San Angelo’s only family-owned supermarket, Super Mercado, has been in town for about nine months now, but for the past 80 years the Claiborne family has been operating on the same three-pronged paradigm.

With an emphasis on providing top-end produce and fresh cut meats, the Hispanic formatted store has enjoyed a wide and varied customer base, reaching from the base to Santa Rita and beyond.

Owner of the store Justin Claiborne, a third-generation grocer, says the idea for the store specializing in typical products and extensive Mexican imports came from his mother and father.

“My mom and dad came up with this concept—the Hispanic format on kind of a higher level,” he said. “They spent a lot of time in Spain and Mexico and kind of understand what we need to go after. About 13 years ago, we opened the one in Midland.”

Justin Claiborne grew up in Lamesa, working each part of the family-owned Claiborne’s grocery store and learning the ins and outs of the business. After an approximately 22-year hiatus roping in rodeo circuits and training horses, Claiborne returned to the family business, intent on carrying out tradition.

“I always knew I was going to come back and take this over,” he said. “We’ve been very successful at it and we’ve been doing it for a long time. It’s hard to find family businesses that have been around for 80 years. Maybe my son will want to do this some day.”

The decision to move from Lamesa to San Angelo was easy, Claiborne said. He has a number of friends in the area from his rodeo days and the city has always appealed to him. Having eyed the old Abbott’s Grocery location, Claiborne decided to buy when it came up for sale and says he feels he’s filling a niche here in San Angelo.

“I feel like there’s not a Hispanic format store in town besides Azteca, but it’s totally different,” he said. “I just felt like there was a need for people that didn’t want to go to the big box stores.”

Since opening, Claiborne has watched his business grow on many fronts, including taking over meat and produce accounts for several high-end local restaurants and developing an ever-growing lunch crowd. He’s even had to put in more tables in chairs, he said, to keep up with the demands of those who stop in for fair-priced bite.

Motioning over to display cases filled with Mexican food, brisket, fried chicken, veggies and other deli foods, he says, “It’s a good, cheap price and these ladies that cook back here, they use their old family recipes and everything’s made from scratch.”

Claiborne says he carries everything a big box store would, but the difference is in the meat and produce. This is how one “separates the boys from the men” in the grocery business, he said.

Much of Super Mercado’s meat and produce comes from the Affiliated Foods warehouse in Amarillo, which his grandfather helped establish several decades ago.

Some of the big box stores will purchase good produce, he said, but it’s typically classed #2, which hasn’t been inspected by the USDA and is often kicked back from markets such as Super Mercado, who only sell #1 class inspected produce.

“They’ll sell it cheaper, but you get it home and it lasts two days or something and you’re like, ‘Man, that went fast,’” he said. “Our produce is only #1. I think the quality of our meat and produce is better than anybody’s, because that’s what our main focus has been. That’s what has got us where we are.”

Super Mercado carries Select angus beef like most other stores in town, but the real prize cuts are Hereford beef, Claiborne explained, which are all corn-fed as opposed to grain fed.  

“It just makes a deeper kind of marble,” he said. “The flavor’s just so much better. We are the only store in town that has a certified Hereford Beef Program.”

With top-notch produce and flavorful cuts of meat, Justin Claiborne hopes to continue the family tradition for years to come.

“We really pride ourselves on kind of an old school [style],” he said. “We want to be friendlier than everybody else, cleaner than everybody else and have better quality. With those things right there you can compete with anybody and that’s what’s kept us around for so long.”

Super Mercado is located at 1501 S. Chadbourne in San Angelo