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.
Kroger has told the local market it intends to keep moving. The company said it is actively visiting and exploring sites across Greater Houston for new locations, per the same chron.com article, even as it closed five Houston-area stores in 2025 and remodeled 17 others, with a similar number of remodels planned for 2026. The grocer has also said it wants to accelerate new-store development across the region over the next three to five years.
Part of a Statewide Marketplace Push
The Waller-area project is one piece of a much larger expansion. Grocery Dive reports that Kroger plans to open numerous Marketplace locations across Indiana, Texas and West Virginia over the next two years, a strategy the outlet describes as redirecting the company's growth toward large-format stores after its unsuccessful attempt to merge with Albertsons.
Texas has already seen several similar projects take shape. Kroger opened a Marketplace store in Fort Worth's Bonds Ranch area last October and is now building additional ones in Anna and the Sendera Ranch community of North Fort Worth, according to Grocery Dive, as part of a $160 million investment announced in mid-2025. Kroger had planned to open the Little Elm store on July 31; the store alone represented an investment of roughly $40 million and is expected to create about 200 jobs, per the Business Journals. Kroger's Texas Division also broke ground in late September on a Marketplace store in Crandall, at the corner of FM 471 and Sunshine Boulevard, a nearly $40 million project spanning close to 100,000 square feet that is expected to create approximately 200 jobs, according to The Shelby Report.
Waller County's Rapid Growth
The Waller-area location lands in a county that has been expanding faster than almost anywhere else in the country. Waller County was the fastest-growing county in Texas and the second-fastest-growing county in the United States between July 2024 and July 2025, according to The Texas Tribune.
That growth shows no sign of slowing. The Waller County Economic Development Partnership says more than 24 residential subdivisions are currently in various stages of development, with plans for approximately 50,000 new homes, a pace of construction projected to double the county's population within the next five to eight years.
