Placing it center stage signals to its customers Sprouts cares about the same things they do – farm-fresh, healthy food and overall well-being. While Sprouts is rapidly expanding into different areas across the country to bring its fresh concept to more people, they just have one architectural prototype. More than 60 percent of its stores are not traditional in shape or size, making layout planning crucial. Our team does 100 percent of the interiors for the Sprouts we work on. For every new store design, Cuhaci Peterson must provide a fixture plan from scratch where we carefully consider the customer journey and balance it against different specifications for linear footage of merchandising and square footage of required storage areas. All while trying to maintain Sprouts’ interior prototype design to meet brand standards.
One of Sprouts’ great innovations was to put its fresh produce in the center of the store; normally, most traditional grocers put it in the perimeter. A nod to their origin as a farmer’s market, this unique store layout is core to who they are and a key part of their best-in-fresh brand identity.
Project Key Facts
“We have to be able to understand our client incredibly well to do it with any kind of efficiency. CP provides more than just drawings; we provide some intangibles that don’t normally get asked about. Things like problem solving, project management and just overall knowledge of the account.”
Eric S Harris, Principal
Sprouts Famers Market - Coconut Grove
Sprouts expanding footprint includes a variety of project types ranging from new ground-up construction to tenant improvements in second or third generation spaces, all the way up to urban mixed-use developments, like it’s new store in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood. Each has its own unique challenges that require multi-format solutions.
The shape of the Coconut Grove space was quite unique leading to a very non-prototypical store layout which took CP working in conjunction directly with our client (the tenant) to maximize the space while maintaining the customer journey, keeping the design as close to the interior visual prototype as possible. This took longer than usual but through a great partnership with the client we were able to get to a layout that hit all the goals.
The utility infrastructure is incredibly important for any grocery tenant and this location presented many challenges. Through constant and consistent communication with all key decision makers we were able to the deliver the desired utilities and compromise as necessary for a successful project.
Being the tenant architect for a small tenant in a large building presents many communication challenges as we are a very small portion of the overall project. However, by building relationships with the shell architect and developer on the project, we were able to overcome these challenges and work closely with them through numerous issues for the best results for everyone.
Through this project and several others like it we have developed a checklist for our client to address these issues before they become problems. We are now our client’s go-to architect for complex mixed-use and multi-story urban projects.
Sprouts Famers Market - The Villages
The Villages in Florida is the fastest growing metro area in the country. When Sprouts decided to enter the popular retirement community and build a new, ground-up store with adjacent retail, they turned to Cuhaci Peterson to develop the entire site. Sprouts The Villages was CP’s first V6 prototype. The V6 prototype has a distinctive barn feature at the front façade and a clean open layout specifically designed so shoppers can visually see all parts of the store the moment they walk in. The local jurisdiction required a very specific Southern Colonial style in the architecture, which required some creative modifications to the existing prototype.
Cuhaci Peterson worked with Sprouts to incorporate elements of The Villages’ preferred Southern Colonial style into the architecture of their V6 prototype. This included both the 23,256-square-foot grocery store and the adjacent retail space called the Omni Building, which has 5 tenants. Some of the elements that were incorporated included the color and the pattern of the brick that was selected and some of the column features that were used. Our team worked diligently to make sure every little detail contributed to a cohesive end product and that the anchor grocery and adjacent retail married stylistically.
Other Multiformat Solutions
Site Adaptations
An example of a tenant-improvement project we’ve done is the 23,500-square-foot Sprouts in Brandon, Florida which took what had been an old sporting-goods store and transformed it into a beautiful new grocery store. The existing curtain wall storefront glass was utilized to allow a vast amount of natural light to filter into the interior and highlight the vaulted ceiling.
Multi-story Mixed Use
CP has helped Sprouts move further into multi-story buildings across the country and each location has its own unique challenges. For example, a Sprouts in Philadelphia located in a 12-story building where our engineering team had to grapple with questions like, where do you place mechanical and refrigeration units typically on the exterior? Another in Sarasota, Florida that was ground level with a pool deck above low ceilings.
The Relationship
Cuhaci Peterson has more than 45 years of experience as an innovator in the grocery industry. In fact, our Sprouts Farmers Market program came to us through our stellar, long-standing grocery practice. The first Sprouts CP worked on was a Tampa-Westchase store, which opened December 9, 2020. In 2021, CP opened a Phoenix office to better serve the needs of our client and made strategic staff acquisitions to help support Sprouts in their goal to develop and rollout more than 30 locations across the U.S.
Our current team has more than 30 years of experience working with Sprouts and our Construction Administration team have also become a trusted partner for Sprouts’ regional construction managers. Over the course of our relationship, we have gone from one prototype location to being the favored Eastern regional architect including leveraging our Philadelphia office to assist with their growth in the northeast market.
