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Charlotte is now about 12 months away from hearing the rooster crow at the area’s first Wegmans.

Why it matters: The Ballantyne groundbreaking for the future store on Wednesday marked the New York-based grocer’s long-awaited expansion into the Charlotte market, with more stores likely to follow.

Zoom in: The 110,000-square-foot store — roughly the size of two standard Harris Teeters — will be about 10,000 square feet larger than Wegmans’ Triangle locations. It’s being built on just over 14 acres along North Community House Road, with a 650-space parking lot.

• The store will feature indoor and outdoor seating, a market serving Wegmans restaurant foods, expansive produce, meat, seafood and cheese sections, an outdoor play area, plus the grocer’s famous overhead circulating train and rooster that crows on the hour.
• It will employ approximately 450 people once it opens. Construction, expected to take about a year, will create more than 250 jobs, according to the company.

Zoom out: Wegmans is already scouting its next North Carolina locations, Axios reported last year.

• Dan Aken, the company’s vice president of real estate, says the grocer was in talks with developer Northwood about a Ballantyne store for roughly eight years. Once Wegmans finally opened a distribution center outside Richmond in 2023, a Charlotte store became possible.
• “We were really excited about the community that’s already built around here, and everything that Northwood was doing with the Ballantyne Reimagined project,” Aken says
• Ballantyne is an unsurprising first choice for a new-to-town grocer. Florida-based Publix and Phoenix-based Sprouts also opened their first Charlotte-area stores in Ballantyne before expanding to other neighborhoods.
• Aken adds that Ballantyne also offered a property large enough for the store.

What’s next: Wegmans is expected to open in fall 2026 at 11550 North Community House Road, a half mile from The Bowl at Ballantyne.