Kroger is getting ready to break ground on a nearly 100,000-square-foot Marketplace store on 11 acres near Waller and Hockley, marking the grocery chain’s first new Houston-area location in nearly a decade. The store will anchor a 38-acre retail development and is expected to create more than 200 jobs once it opens.
The project, first reported by the Houston Business Journal, comes as Kroger looks to add several more locations across the Houston area in the years ahead. It also puts a punctuation mark on a long dry spell for new store openings in the region, which has otherwise been defined by closures and remodeling rather than fresh construction.
Kroger’s last brand-new Houston-area store opened back in August 2018, at 18861 S. University Blvd. in Sugar Land, according to chron.com. That seven-year gap, confirmed as of January, has made the Waller County project a notable reversal for a company that spent much of the past decade investing in existing stores rather than building new ones.
A Bigger Format Built for Growth
The planned store fits squarely within Kroger’s preferred Houston-area format, which the same chron.com report says typically runs between 100,000 and 123,000 square feet. Company-wide, Marketplace stores generally occupy 99,000 to 130,000 square feet, according to Grocery Dive, and each location costs roughly $40 million to develop…