H-E-B opens its first double-decker store in Houston
H-E-B on Wednesday opened its first multilevel grocery store in the Houston area, a reflection of the rising cost of land and increasing density of the city’s urban neighborhoods.
The 78,000-square-foot store, at Bissonnet and Rice in Bellaire, sits on the top floor of a two-story parking garage. Shoppers can use three oversized elevators, two escalators or a cart escalator to get into and out of the store. An interactive LED light installation by San Antonio-based artist Ansen Seale changes colors as patrons go up and down the stairs.
Grocers are building upward as it has become increasingly difficult to assemble large tracts of land to build suburban-style supermarkets inside the city. H-E-B’s Bellaire store is the first of four multilevel locations the company is building in the Houston area.
“It was time for us to give Bellaire a large-format store,” Armando Perez, senior vice president of H-E-B Houston, said on a tour Monday. “This was the only way for us to make it happen.”
Multilevel grocery stores are not a new concept in Houston. The Randalls in Midtown, the Phoenicia Specialty Foods downtown and the Whole Foods Market in Uptown split their stores and parking across multiple floors.
H-E-B is expanding the concept in Houston, building dou-
ble-decker stores in Bellaire, Meyerland and the Heights. The San Antoniobased grocer also is partnering with Houstonbased Midway to develop a grocery-anchored apartment midrise at Washington Avenue and Heights Boulevard.
“H-E-B is a pioneer in this approach,” said Ed Wulfe, chairman and CEO of Wulfe & Co., which developed BLVD Place, the mixed-use project in Uptown anchored by a Whole Foods with underground parking. “We’ll see more grocers going with multistory to make a smaller sites work.”
H-E-B began developing multilevel stores several years ago, and now has six such ones in northern Mexico and one in San Antonio. The company typically builds stores on 10- to 15acre tracts in the suburbs, with the company’s smaller pantry stores going on sites as small as 7 acres.
With a two-story concept, H-E-B can build stores on smaller parcels, allowing the grocer to enter urban neighborhoods where land is more expensive.
H-E-B already had a location in Bellaire, a 28,000square-foot pantry store that was performing well, Perez said. However, the grocer wanted to maximize its prime location, so it decided to close and redevelop the site.
The new Bellaire store, 5106 Bissonnet, more than doubles the size of its predecessor.
It has sections for produce and meat, seafood and sushi, a bakery and tortilleria, a deli and prepared foods, and a florist and outdoor garden area. There are areas for cooking demonstrations and food samples, as well as a wine-tasting kiosk with eight wines and four beers on tap.
The pharmacy and curbside pickup are on the ground floor. The grocer is working with Four J Foods to open a coffee shop and cafe called The Roastery on the upper floor.
H-E-B tried to tailor the store to the neighborhood’s food preferences, Perez said. The store has an outsized health food and gluten-free foods section, a dry-aged beef stand and a poké bowl kiosk.
In addition, the store features the largest kosher section of any H-E-B store in Houston: nearly one aisle filled with Kedem grape juice, matzo balls and challah bread. H-E-B is building a new store in nearby Meyerland Plaza after its Meyerland store was flooded three times in as many years.
“We knew this store was going to be serving the Meyerland community, too,” Perez said.
Customers have taken well to H-E-B’s multilevel stores in Mexico and San Antonio, Perez said. For one thing, the garage will keep patrons and their cars dry and in the shade during Houston’s hot and rainy summers, he said.
“Time will tell,” Perez said, when asked whether Houstonians will respond positively to the two-story format. “We’ll learn and go from here. We hope everyone is happy with what we came up with.”