Sprouts Farmers Market has signed a lease to anchor Grand Imperial Marketplace, a retail center now under construction at the northwest corner of Grand Parkway and Imperial Promenade Drive in Spring, Texas. The health-focused grocer's new store at 5922 Imperial Promenade Dr. is expected to become the tenth Sprouts location in the Greater Houston region once it opens, joining a shopping center that will also house Marshalls, Ross, Burlington, Five Below and Planet Fitness.
The 170,000-square-foot development is a joint venture between Houston-based Fidelis Realty Partners and 830 Investors, Ltd., the master developer behind the neighboring Falls at Imperial Oaks community, with architectural design led by Levinson Alcoser Associates, according to Fidelis Realty Partners. As WhatNow first reported, the center has been described as spanning anywhere from 170,000 to 200,000 square feet, and Sprouts now has a signed lease for space there.
Construction on the Sprouts building is slated to begin this fall, with completion targeted for fall 2027, ahead of the chain's estimated 2028 grand opening, per Fidelis. That timeline puts the finished shell about a year ahead of the actual store launch, a gap that reflects how national retailers often lock down buildout schedules well before flipping on the lights.
Why Grand Parkway Retailers See an Opening in Spring
The site sits across from a planned Townsen Road extension designed to smooth traffic flow between Interstate 45 and Interstate 69, Fidelis notes. It also faces daily traffic counts of nearly 62,000 vehicles just west of the property and serves a three-mile population with a median household income of $146,854, according to the same Fidelis listing.
That combination of high traffic and high incomes lines up with an explosion of rooftops nearby. Fidelis says the marketplace is positioned to serve more than 13,700 planned new residential lots across nine master-planned communities in Spring, including the 3,700-home Highlands development and a 1,750-home expansion of Woodson's Reserve.
A Smaller Footprint Fuels Faster Growth
Sprouts' expansion strategy leans on a scaled-down store format of roughly 21,000 to 25,000 square feet, well below the chain's legacy 30,000-plus-square-foot boxes. That smaller footprint cuts buildout costs by about 20% and has helped small-format Sprouts locations post an 8.8% year-over-year traffic gain in the first quarter of 2025, according to Placer.ai.
The Spring lease is part of a broader Houston-area growth spurt for the chain. Sprouts opened a 23,800-square-foot store in Webster's Baybrook Gateway center in May, repurposing a former Party City space, and debuted a Kingwood location at King's Crossing in April, according to Realty News Report — expansion Hoodline covered in its Baybrook grocery debut and Kingwood grocery wars stories. Sprouts is also working on another Houston-area opening in The Woodlands, where a $3.46 million interior renovation of a vacant, 30,478-square-foot former Randalls space at Panther Creek Village Center is scheduled to launch in September, as Hoodline detailed in its report on Panther Creek's grocery anchor.
From a San Diego Fruit Stand to a National Chain
Sprouts traces its roots to a family grocery business dating back to 1943, when Henry Boney opened a fruit stand in San Diego, California, according to WhatNow's reporting. That stand grew into Henry's Farmers Market, which the Boney family sold in the late 1990s before Stan Boney and Shon Boney launched Sprouts Farmers Market that same era. The chain was formally founded in 2002 in Chandler, Arizona, and went public on the Nasdaq in 2013.
Sprouts now operates more than 480 stores across 25 states, including 68 in Texas and eight already in the Greater Houston region, per WhatNow. The stores are built around an open layout with fresh produce at the center, and the chain markets itself on organic, plant-based and gluten-free offerings alongside what it calls fresh, natural and better-for-you products.
Chasing the Health-Enthusiast Shopper
Corporately, Sprouts has said it is chasing a $250 billion health-enthusiast segment within the broader $1.2 trillion U.S. grocery market, deliberately paring down general merchandise to focus on organic, gluten-free and natural products, according to Modern Retail. That specialty focus, paired with a leaner store format, has become the template for how the chain is rolling into fast-growing suburbs like Spring — where new subdivisions keep arriving faster than the grocery stores meant to serve them.
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