Sahara Food Market

Sahara Food Market operates at 3570 North State Road 7 in Lauderdale Lakes, a specialty grocery and prepared-food shop that stands apart from the Caribbean and Chinese restaurants that make up most of the businesses along this stretch of the corridor. According to its Yellow Pages listing, the market has been in business for thirty-nine years, which would place its founding in roughly 1987, making it, by a wide margin, the longest-tenured independent food business identified in Lauderdale Lakes for this collection.

The market’s directory listing describes it as offering fresh halal meat alongside homemade prepared items, and a customer review attached to the listing calls the market “exceptional, very clean, with an amazing variety of Middle Eastern grocery and customer service,” specifically naming hummus, falafel, pita and baklava among the items available. That combination, a halal butcher counter paired with a Middle Eastern grocery and a prepared-foods case, is a specific and useful resource for the Middle Eastern and Muslim households in and around Lauderdale Lakes, a smaller but still meaningful part of the city’s broader immigrant population alongside its larger Caribbean and West Indian communities.

Sahara Food Market keeps consistent hours seven days a week, open from 9 in the morning to 7 at night with no day off, a schedule that reflects its dual role as both a grocery store, which customers expect to be reliably open, and a prepared-food counter. Its Yellow Pages price range designation places it at the more affordable end of the scale, and the business maintains a presence on Facebook at facebook.com/saharafoodmarket in addition to a dedicated website, saharafoodmarket.com.

A search of Florida corporate records under the Sahara Food Market name did not turn up an exact match; the closest entities found were Sahara Foods, Inc., an older corporation currently listed as inactive, and Sahara Halal Inc, a more recently filed and currently active company whose name, given the market’s stated halal meat offering, may plausibly be connected to the business, though this could not be independently confirmed through the sources available for this profile. Regardless of the precise corporate paper trail, a thirty-nine-year run on the same stretch of North State Road 7 makes Sahara Food Market one of the true legacy independent businesses in Lauderdale Lakes, predating nearly every other restaurant and market profiled in this collection by a decade or more.

Its location roughly midway along the North State Road 7 corridor puts Sahara Food Market within a short drive of both the Caribbean restaurant cluster to the south and the Shops at Oriole Estates plaza to the north, giving it a central position for shoppers who split their errands between the market’s grocery and butcher counter and the surrounding restaurants and bakeries on the same stretch of road.