H-E-B Has Finally Announced Its First Dallas Store. A Brief History of How We Got Here.
It’s been a long time coming, but Dallas residents can finally get in on the obsession.
By Dan Solomon January 17, 2025
Texans love H-E-B. It is, as we discovered through many rigorous rounds of voting a few years back, our readers’ favorite Texas brand. We like its curbside-pickup system. We like the way it takes care of Texans during a crisis. We like the novelty potato chip flavors. We like (most of) the food-themed scented candles. We like the Selena bags (boy, do we ever!). We like how one little boy loved H-E-B so much that he celebrated his fifth birthday there. We love the tortillas, and we find the dessert-flavored hummuses to be, er, unique.
And yet! Despite the store spending many years as a beloved Texas institution, some 1.3 million Texans who live in Dallas have long had to make do with Kroger and Tom Thumb for their supermarket needs. A handful of one-off H-E-B stores in North Texas have been around for a few years, but butter tortillas or no, if you live in, say, Oak Cliff, it’s hard to convince yourself to drive almost thirty miles to Plano or Waxahachie to visit a store.
Accordingly, every time the company has inched itself in the direction of a possible store in Dallas proper, the hopes of North Texas H-E-B heads have soared.
On Wednesday, the long-anticipated news finally landed: H-E-B announced that it had purchased land at Hillcrest Road and Interstate 635 with the intention of developing it into the company’s first store in Dallas city limits. In the press release announcing the move, managing director of public affairs Mabrie Jackson said, “While we have a lot of work to do, we look forward to connecting with our neighbors, the city, and community stakeholders to ensure we create a destination that best supports this community. This is the first step in a long process, and we hope to share more details with our neighbors soon.”
This isn’t the first time H-E-B has acquired property in the city — it’s just the first time such an acquisition has come with an announcement that an actual H-E-B store would be coming to Dallas as part of the deal. Back in 2016, the company acquired a half dozen Sun Fresh Market stores in the area, leading to widespread speculation that it was finally ready to enter Dallas. H-E-B quickly poured cold water on those hopes, explaining a few months later that it had purchased the stores to convert prime locations into Central Markets instead.
Until recently, Central Market has accounted for the bulk of the company’s footprint inside Dallas. H-E-B opened its first Central Market store — a smaller, Whole Foods–like subbrand focused on organic and premium products — in 2001, and it currently operates three stores within the city, after converting two of the Sun Fresh Market locations. Dallas, in fact, could fairly be described as the subbrand’s core market at this point — a full 60 percent of Central Market locations are in Dallas or nearby cities. The region is home to three Central Market stores within city limits, as well as outposts in Fort Worth, Plano, and Southlake. The Austin area, on the other hand, is home to at least twenty H-E-B stores but only a pair of Central Markets. That’s twice as many as you’ll find in Houston, or even in the company’s hometown of San Antonio.
Still, while Central Market is great if you’re putting on a wine-and-cheese party, prefer your chicken pasture-raised at a local farm, or need to choose from a half dozen varieties of sweet potato for a recipe, you won’t find Doritos or enormous, cheap, and delicious sheet cakes there. For those, you need H-E-B itself.
As recently as 2018, the options for North Texans seeking an H-E-B fix were limited to a few scattered stores, all well south of the Metroplex itself—Burleson, Cleburne, Corsicana, Ennis, and Waxahachie have all had stores for some time, with Ennis’s being the longest tenured (it opened in the 1970s). When H-E-B finally added an option north of Interstate 20, in 2019, in Hudson Oaks — a small town about 25 miles west of downtown Fort Worth—locals lost their ever-loving minds. Customers began lining up at 3:30 in the morning on opening day.
Competing squads of cheerleaders turned up to celebrate, and some dudes showed up on horseback. It was a whole thing! The local county judge, who’d held public office in the area for two decades, got emotional at the sight. “This is probably the most gratifying win ever in twenty years in Hudson Oaks,” he told the local paper.
Part of why the opening was such a local triumph was that it was tiny Hudson Oaks (population 2,484) that got the H-E-B store in the region, not one of the big cities to the east. And that remained the case for several years; it wasn’t until 2021 that the company announced its plans to break ground on stores in the Metroplex’s larger cities, with the first locations opening in 2022.
Since that announcement, H-E-B has begun to spread across the region. It currently operates seven locations across Plano, Frisco, Allen, McKinney, Fort Worth, and Mansfield. It’s not the soon-to-be existence of a single Dallas H-E-B that makes the recent announcement big news — it’s the prospect that this is a major step in the company’s inexorable march toward domination of yet another major Texas population center. H-E-B didn’t open its first Houston store until 2001. By 2015, it was the largest grocery chain in the entire city, surpassing Kroger and Walmart. The spread of H-E-B across North Texas has been deliberate, methodical, and slow — but with this announcement, mass expansion across the region seems downright inevitable.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/h-e-b-first-dallas-store-history/
It’s been a long time coming, but Dallas residents can finally get in on the obsession.
By Dan Solomon January 17, 2025
Texans love H-E-B. It is, as we discovered through many rigorous rounds of voting a few years back, our readers’ favorite Texas brand. We like its curbside-pickup system. We like the way it takes care of Texans during a crisis. We like the novelty potato chip flavors. We like (most of) the food-themed scented candles. We like the Selena bags (boy, do we ever!). We like how one little boy loved H-E-B so much that he celebrated his fifth birthday there. We love the tortillas, and we find the dessert-flavored hummuses to be, er, unique.
And yet! Despite the store spending many years as a beloved Texas institution, some 1.3 million Texans who live in Dallas have long had to make do with Kroger and Tom Thumb for their supermarket needs. A handful of one-off H-E-B stores in North Texas have been around for a few years, but butter tortillas or no, if you live in, say, Oak Cliff, it’s hard to convince yourself to drive almost thirty miles to Plano or Waxahachie to visit a store.
Accordingly, every time the company has inched itself in the direction of a possible store in Dallas proper, the hopes of North Texas H-E-B heads have soared.
On Wednesday, the long-anticipated news finally landed: H-E-B announced that it had purchased land at Hillcrest Road and Interstate 635 with the intention of developing it into the company’s first store in Dallas city limits. In the press release announcing the move, managing director of public affairs Mabrie Jackson said, “While we have a lot of work to do, we look forward to connecting with our neighbors, the city, and community stakeholders to ensure we create a destination that best supports this community. This is the first step in a long process, and we hope to share more details with our neighbors soon.”
This isn’t the first time H-E-B has acquired property in the city — it’s just the first time such an acquisition has come with an announcement that an actual H-E-B store would be coming to Dallas as part of the deal. Back in 2016, the company acquired a half dozen Sun Fresh Market stores in the area, leading to widespread speculation that it was finally ready to enter Dallas. H-E-B quickly poured cold water on those hopes, explaining a few months later that it had purchased the stores to convert prime locations into Central Markets instead.
Until recently, Central Market has accounted for the bulk of the company’s footprint inside Dallas. H-E-B opened its first Central Market store — a smaller, Whole Foods–like subbrand focused on organic and premium products — in 2001, and it currently operates three stores within the city, after converting two of the Sun Fresh Market locations. Dallas, in fact, could fairly be described as the subbrand’s core market at this point — a full 60 percent of Central Market locations are in Dallas or nearby cities. The region is home to three Central Market stores within city limits, as well as outposts in Fort Worth, Plano, and Southlake. The Austin area, on the other hand, is home to at least twenty H-E-B stores but only a pair of Central Markets. That’s twice as many as you’ll find in Houston, or even in the company’s hometown of San Antonio.
Still, while Central Market is great if you’re putting on a wine-and-cheese party, prefer your chicken pasture-raised at a local farm, or need to choose from a half dozen varieties of sweet potato for a recipe, you won’t find Doritos or enormous, cheap, and delicious sheet cakes there. For those, you need H-E-B itself.
As recently as 2018, the options for North Texans seeking an H-E-B fix were limited to a few scattered stores, all well south of the Metroplex itself—Burleson, Cleburne, Corsicana, Ennis, and Waxahachie have all had stores for some time, with Ennis’s being the longest tenured (it opened in the 1970s). When H-E-B finally added an option north of Interstate 20, in 2019, in Hudson Oaks — a small town about 25 miles west of downtown Fort Worth—locals lost their ever-loving minds. Customers began lining up at 3:30 in the morning on opening day.
Competing squads of cheerleaders turned up to celebrate, and some dudes showed up on horseback. It was a whole thing! The local county judge, who’d held public office in the area for two decades, got emotional at the sight. “This is probably the most gratifying win ever in twenty years in Hudson Oaks,” he told the local paper.
Part of why the opening was such a local triumph was that it was tiny Hudson Oaks (population 2,484) that got the H-E-B store in the region, not one of the big cities to the east. And that remained the case for several years; it wasn’t until 2021 that the company announced its plans to break ground on stores in the Metroplex’s larger cities, with the first locations opening in 2022.
Since that announcement, H-E-B has begun to spread across the region. It currently operates seven locations across Plano, Frisco, Allen, McKinney, Fort Worth, and Mansfield. It’s not the soon-to-be existence of a single Dallas H-E-B that makes the recent announcement big news — it’s the prospect that this is a major step in the company’s inexorable march toward domination of yet another major Texas population center. H-E-B didn’t open its first Houston store until 2001. By 2015, it was the largest grocery chain in the entire city, surpassing Kroger and Walmart. The spread of H-E-B across North Texas has been deliberate, methodical, and slow — but with this announcement, mass expansion across the region seems downright inevitable.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/h-e-b-first-dallas-store-history/