The Marketplace at Heritage Harbour Is Turning Into Two Different Shopping Centers

Jonathan Ith walked into his first shift at the DeSoto Square Mall Chick-fil-A on March 7, 1989. He was 11 when his family made it to Bradenton after surviving the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and he didn't speak English when he started at that elementary school across town. He's run the Creekwood Chick-fil-A on State Road 70 for the last 25 years, growing it to roughly $12 million a year in sales. Now he's moving north to a new store going up in Heritage Harbour, and by his own projection it's going to do somewhere between $15 million and $18 million a year, which would make it one of the highest-volume Chick-fil-A locations in Florida.

The new building explains why. It's over 6,000 square feet, about 40 percent bigger than Creekwood's 4,300. The drive-thru holds 52 cars at once instead of 25. Half of Creekwood's 120 team members are transferring over. Chick-fil-A's own timeline points to the third quarter of 2026, a window that closes this week, so if you drive State Road 64 past Grand Harbour Parkway you're either watching it open or watching it about to.

That one store is a useful marker, but it's not really the story. The story is what's happening around it. The Marketplace at Heritage Harbour, the Costco and Target-anchored plaza off I-75 and SR 64, and the smaller Landing at Heritage Harbour a short walk away are settling into two distinct identities, and if you live in Heritage Harbour, River Strand, Stoneybrook, or anywhere along that stretch, it changes which direction you actually drive depending on what you need.

What's Already Open on the Costco Side

Costco was first through the door back in 2019. Since then the anchor tenants have filled in steadily: Target opened in August 2025, and Academy Sports + Outdoors, Hobby Lobby, Miller's Ale House, LongHorn Steakhouse, Seasons 52, and CAVA are all open and operating today. That's the established layer.

The newer layer is three restaurant leases confirmed this year. Fresh Kitchen, the fast-casual bowl concept that started in South Tampa in 2014 and now has 17 locations statewide including one at The Shoppes at University Town Center, is taking space in a five-unit building just north of LongHorn Steakhouse. U-Yee Sushi & Grill is opening its second location in the same building, a compact 1,500 square feet, six years after its original spot near University Parkway in Lakewood Ranch opened in 2020. Pure Green Juice Bar, a cold-pressed juice and acai bowl franchise founded in New York in 2014, is slated for a four-unit space next to a planned Whole Foods, and it's opening a second area location at The Market at UTC around the same time.

That Whole Foods is still a plan, not a building. So are Cold Stone Creamery, Lucky Goat Coffee Co., Qdoba Mexican Eats, and Mister O1 Extraordinary Pizza, all listed as future tenants on the developer's leasing plan. Worth knowing before you circle a date on the calendar: Portillo's had filed paperwork for a spot in this same plaza and is no longer on the leasing plan at all. Retail leasing plans are directional, not binding, and this stretch of Bradenton has already shown that a listed tenant can quietly disappear before it ever breaks ground.

A Few Hundred Yards Away, a Different Kind of Plaza

Walk or drive over to the Landing at Heritage Harbour and the mix changes completely. Panera Bread is open. So is a Smoothie King, a BODYBAR Pilates studio, a Prime IV Hydration & Wellness location, North Lakewood Dental, and Elite Sports Recovery Center. A Tim Hortons is still listed as planned.

Line those two lists up and the split is obvious. The Marketplace side is building out national quick-serve and casual dining brands at scale, chains competing on volume and drive-thru throughput. The Landing is filling in with health, recovery, and personal-care businesses at a smaller, more service-oriented pace. One plaza is optimized for dinner and errands. The other is optimized for a dental cleaning, a Pilates class, and a hydration drip on the way home. Neither is bigger or more important than the other. They're just answering different questions about what a growing part of Manatee County needs on a Tuesday.

Ith put his own version of that growth into words when he talked about why Creekwood needed a second location at all.

"We're busting at the seams here because the demand is still here."

That's a Chick-fil-A operator talking about chicken sandwiches, but it applies to the whole corridor. The demand didn't show up because a developer built a plaza. The plaza expanded because the demand was already there and outgrew what one building could hold.

What's Still Just a Sign

It's worth keeping a clear line between what you can walk into today and what's still a rendering on a leasing map. Open right now: Costco, Target, Academy Sports + Outdoors, Hobby Lobby, Miller's Ale House, LongHorn Steakhouse, Seasons 52, CAVA, Panera Bread, Smoothie King, BODYBAR Pilates, Prime IV Hydration & Wellness, North Lakewood Dental, and Elite Sports Recovery Center. Under construction or about to open: Chick-fil-A, targeting the tail end of Q3 2026. Signed but not yet built out: Fresh Kitchen, U-Yee Sushi & Grill's second location, Pure Green Juice Bar. Planned but not yet under construction, and therefore the least certain: Whole Foods, Cold Stone Creamery, Lucky Goat Coffee Co., Qdoba Mexican Eats, Mister O1 Extraordinary Pizza, and Tim Hortons.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A restaurant on a leasing plan is a company's stated intention, backed by a signed lease in most cases, but it's not a guarantee of a grand opening date, and Portillo's is the proof sitting right there on the same plan.

What This Means If You Already Live Around Heritage Harbour

If you've been running one loop for dinner and one loop for everything else, that's probably going to keep splitting into two separate trips rather than merging into one. The Marketplace side is where the restaurant rotation keeps changing. The Landing is where the same handful of wellness and service businesses are settling in for the long haul.

The Chick-fil-A drive-thru math is the most immediate practical detail here. Creekwood's line backed up regularly because 25 car spots wasn't enough for the volume it was doing. Heritage Harbour's new store more than doubles that to 52, which should mean shorter waits once it's running at full capacity, though the first few weeks after any high-volume opening tend to test that math before it settles.

For a corridor that was still mostly empty land a decade ago, having Costco, Target, a Whole Foods on the way, and a wellness cluster with a dentist, a Pilates studio, and a recovery center all within walking distance of each other is a genuine shift in what daily errands look like out here. It didn't happen because northeast Bradenton got discovered. It happened because the people already living in Heritage Harbour, River Strand, and Stoneybrook kept showing up, and the businesses that noticed built bigger.

If you want the fuller picture of how this whole stretch of SR 64 has been filling in, from the Publix that opened at Northchase this past June to the plazas east of I-75, we broke that down in an earlier look at how the SR 64 corridor is becoming northeast Bradenton's Main Street. You can also browse what's happening more broadly around the neighborhood on our Bradenton Northeast page.

We keep a close eye on this stretch of Manatee County because we work in it every week, not because we're trying to sell you on it. If you've got a question about what's actually open, what's just a sign, or anything else happening around Heritage Harbour, the Argelia Vidal Team is easy to reach and happy to talk it through.