The Wake County grocery map is redrawing itself, and Wendell is on it

The most consequential retail decisions in Wake County right now aren’t restaurants. They’re grocery stores, and the map is redrawing itself from Wendell to Holly Springs. The News & Observer compiled the timeline this year, and reading it as a county map instead of a list tells you exactly where the growth is going next.

Why groceries move first

A grocery store is the one retail category that gets visited on a schedule, weekly, list in hand, rain or shine, which is why developers chase the anchors before anything else and why this list is really a forecast. Restaurants follow groceries; banks and clinics follow restaurants; and the small independents that fill a directory follow all three. Read the store map below with that chain in mind.

The scoreboard so far in 2026

Target opened its Fuquay-Varina store in March, and it wasn’t just any store: it was the chain’s 2,000th, a milestone the company chose to plant in a Wake County suburb, which is its own statement about where American retail thinks the customers are. Companies don’t spend milestone announcements on afterthoughts; Fuquay-Varina got the 2,000th store because the growth curves there look like Wake Forest’s did five years ago. BJ’s Wholesale Club expanded to Selma in late January, just over the Johnston County line. And the pipeline behind them is deeper than any recent year: Whole Foods Market has a new Cary store in the works, a telling pick given Cary already hosts nearly every grocer operating in the state, Sprouts Farmers Market is aiming for early 2027 off Glenwood Avenue at Pleasant Valley Promenade, and Publix added its second Durham store in April at the Latta Park development, a 42,240-square-foot store that shows the format these suburban builds now favor: big enough for full service, small enough to slot into a neighborhood center rather than command a highway pad.

Wendell gets a Lowes Foods, and it matters more than it sounds

The entry that matters most to our readers sits at the quiet end of the list: Lowes Foods is opening two new Wake County stores, one in Wendell and one in Fuquay-Varina, with the Wendell location opening first, per the grocer’s guest engagement director in the N&O’s reporting. No dates yet, and Lowes Foods, the Winston-Salem-based grocer with its beer dens and chicken kitchens, tends to announce late and build fast. But a full-service grocery anchor is the single strongest predictor of what happens to a small downtown’s business ecosystem, because it converts pass-through traffic into weekly, scheduled trips. Wendell’s business roster already punches above its weight for a town its size. A Lowes Foods anchor is how the next fifty businesses decide the rooftops are real.

Holly Springs joins the Wegmans club

Wegmans plans a Holly Springs store targeting 2027, which would be the grocer’s fifth in the Triangle. Wake Forest readers already know what that means; the Wegmans across Highway 98 from the Grove 98 corridor is a daily-trip magnet that helped six restaurants and a bank decide the corner was worth signing for. Grocery anchors work like gravity: they don’t just feed a neighborhood, they schedule it, and the retail that wants those customers arranges itself accordingly. Holly Springs is about to run the experiment Wake Forest just finished, and if the sequence holds, the announcement lists for 2028 and 2029 there will read like our Grove 98 coverage does today: an anchor, then a bank, then a medical office, then six places to eat.

What the eastern county should notice

For readers in Wendell, Zebulon and Knightdale, the BJ’s landing in Selma is worth a second look even though it crossed the county line: eastern Wake’s shopping trips have long drained west toward Capital Boulevard, and every anchor that opens along the U.S. 64 and 264 corridors shortens that drive and keeps the sales tax closer to the towns generating it. Between the Selma club, the coming Wendell Lowes Foods and Knightdale’s existing retail spine, the east side’s errand map is consolidating closer to home for the first time in a generation. Smaller businesses read those maps too, and the ones we add to the directory from the eastern towns over the next two years will mostly be betting on exactly this shift.

How to read the map

Put the pins in and the pattern is plain, and it’s worth saying what’s missing too: no major announcements inside the beltline or in central Cary, where the grocery map is effectively finished and the land costs what it costs. The chains are betting on the county’s edges, Fuquay-Varina, Wendell, Holly Springs, Selma, not its center, because the edges are where the rooftops are still being framed. Every grocery anchor on this list will pull a train of smaller signings behind it: the fitness studios, nail salons, juice bars and taco shops that filled Rogers Branch Road and Grove 98 here at home. We watched that sequence play out twice in Wake Forest in two years, which is why we’ll be watching Wendell’s timeline closest of all; it’s one of our six towns, its anchor is coming, and no local outlet is better positioned to cover what follows it block by block. When the smaller signings follow, they’ll show up in the directory and the news section as they land, the same way this year’s 44 Wake Forest arrivals did this week. Hear a date for the Wendell store before we do? You know where to send it.