Sprouts Farmers Market Opens Its 500th Store in The Woodlands, Texas

Sprouts Farmers Market opened its 500th store on September 12 in The Woodlands, Texas, a 30,478-square-foot location at 4775 W. Panther Creek Dr. that fills a former Randalls box that had sat empty in the Panther Creek Village Center for years, according to My Neighborhood News and The Shelby Report. It wasn't a solo milestone. Within the same week, Sprouts also opened stores in Sewell, New Jersey, Carson, California, and Mesa, Arizona, a four-store burst that pushed the specialty grocer past the 500-location mark across 25 states.

Sprouts traces back to 2002, when members of the Boney family opened the first store in Chandler, Arizona, building on a farmers market business the family had run since 1943. The chain went public on Nasdaq under the ticker SFM in 2013 and has spent the years since refining a small-box format built around fresh produce, bulk foods and a health-focused assortment. That format is exactly what showed up in The Woodlands: a mid-size box dropped into an already-developed center rather than a ground-up build.

The geography of that single week says something about how Sprouts fills in its map. Texas is a mature market for the chain, and The Woodlands store is an infill move, backfilling a vacant anchor rather than chasing new rooftops. New Jersey and California are markets where Sprouts is still building density, and Mesa sits close to home turf. Four stores, four different jobs on the expansion checklist.

The Woodlands opening also came with the kind of local tie-ins Sprouts leans on to plant itself in a market. The store is partnered with the Houston Food Bank through Sprouts' Food Rescue program, which routes unsellable-but-edible groceries to hunger-relief efforts instead of the dumpster, and it's stocking produce from Texas growers including J&B Farms and Little Bear Produce. The company has already lined up its next Houston-area store, planned for the Grand Imperial Marketplace near Grand Parkway and Imperial Promenade Drive in Spring.

Sprouts closed its second quarter on June 28 with 490 stores and $2.3 billion in net sales, up 5% year over year, though comparable store sales slipped 1%, the company said in its second-quarter earnings release. Net income came in at $129 million on diluted earnings of $1.37 per share. The balance sheet is in good shape for a company still opening stores at pace: $224 million in cash and no borrowings against its $600 million credit facility, as of that same quarter.

Management has raised its pipeline for the year. Full-year guidance now calls for 42 net new stores in fiscal 2026, and the company told The Shelby Report it expects at least 15 openings in the third quarter alone, its largest quarterly cadence yet. Full-year sales growth guidance sits at 5.5% to 6.5%, with comparable sales guided to a range of negative 0.5% to positive 0.5%.

"Our second quarter results were in line with our expectations, and the core elements of our strategy remain strong," CEO Jack Sinclair said in the earnings release, adding that the company's toughest prior-year sales comparisons are now behind it.

The Woodlands backfill is a pattern worth tracking on its own. Sprouts has shown a repeated willingness to take second-generation grocery boxes, particularly ones left behind by Albertsons-banner closures, rather than insist on new construction. Landlords sitting on a dark 25,000-to-35,000-square-foot anchor should have this chain on the call list. There's a real tension between the growth story and the comp story, too: same-store sales fell even as the unit count climbed, which raises the ordinary question of whether some of that growth comes at the expense of existing stores in already-served metros like Houston. And "largest quarterly cadence yet" for Q3 is the kind of guidance brokers should treat as a signal to get ahead of, not react to after leases are already signed. With $224 million in cash and an untapped credit line, Sprouts has the balance sheet to keep taking well-located space on its own timeline, rather than waiting for the perfect ground-up site.