Whole Foods has plans for new store in North Austin
Source: Austin American Statesman
Michelle Breyer

Whole Foods Market Inc., which is building a new flagship store in downtown Austin, will follow with a new North Austin store at MoPac Boulevard (Loop 1) and Braker Lane within the next few years.

The new store will replace the company's nine-year-old store in the Gateway shopping center and will be twice as large -- 70,000 square feet.

The Gateway store's lease runs through 2010, but Whole Foods said it may move to the new location sooner than that.

Gateway "is clearly one of our older-generation stores," said Jim Sud, executive vice president of growth and development for Whole Foods. "We worked for months, looking at all types of options. The short answer was that we couldn't come up with a viable alternative (at Gateway) that would give us the space we needed."

The new store will be between two new retail centers, the Domain and the Shops at Arbor Walk.

"It will probably feel like one development even though (the store) will be a stand-alone development," Sud said.

Whole Foods may move up its timeline for the new store, Sud said. But much depends on progress of the two other shopping centers.

Endeavor Real Estate Group and Simon Property Group Inc. plan to have up to 800,000 square feet of shops, restaurants and entertainment facilities at the Domain. They hope to break ground late this year or in early 2005 and already have lined up Neiman Marcus as an anchor.

Simon, which also owns the Gateway center, plans to break ground in early 2005 on the 550,000-square-foot Shops at Arbor Walk.

"We don't want to be a store out there on our own," Sud said. "We're anxious for other developments to get going and get established. We're positioning ourselves for the future."

Sud said the company wanted the new store to stand alone because being part of a multiuse development can entail compromises when it comes to parking and access. This property, he said, provided an ideal alternative.

"It's the great site with the power of all the great retail going up around us without having to be in the middle of it," he said. "We think it's the best of both worlds."

Whole Foods has leased the land for its new store from Braker Pointe Joint Venture, a partnership headed by Schlosser Development Corp. Schlosser is developing the company's downtown Austin headquarters and 80,000-square-foot flagship store at West Sixth Street and North Lamar Boulevard.

As Whole Foods' offerings have increased and its customer base has grown, the company's Gateway store, which opened nine years ago, has become increasingly cramped and outdated.

Once a single 11,000-square-foot natural foods store on North Lamar Boulevard, Whole Foods stores have gotten increasingly larger over the years -- in some cases rivaling the size of traditional supermarkets.

The average size of Whole Foods' existing 160 stores is 31,000 square feet; the average size of the 49 sites in development average 47,000 square feet.

Whole Foods has found that larger stores -- with a bigger assortment of produce and prepared foods -- attract more customers from traditional stores, Sud said. "The new, larger stores we've been opening have been very successful," he said.

By 2010, the company hopes to have 300 stores and sales of $10 billion.

Sud said little about what features to expect in the new store.

"We continue to grow and evolve and get better," he said. "By the time that store opens, who knows what we'll have in there?"

mbreyer@statesman.com; 445-3641

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