Why Grocery Anchors Still Win

Why grocery anchors still win — with Kevin Bissell

For 35 years, Kevin Bissell has been walking grocery stores. Not the executive tour, not the quarterly analyst visit — the actual aisles, the back of the produce section, the parking lot at 11am on a Tuesday. He's the Senior Vice President of Real Estate Research at CRE360 Partners, and he's spent three and a half decades building the kind of knowledge about grocery real estate that doesn't live in any database.

In this first episode of The Ground Truth, host Mike Law sits down with Kevin to ask a simple question: with e-commerce, delivery apps, and everyone predicting the death of physical retail, why does the grocery-anchored shopping center just keep outperforming?

The conversation goes deep on what Kevin actually looks for when he steps foot in a new market, why traffic data and cell-phone analytics only tell part of the story, and why regional grocers are quietly winning in markets where the national chains can't compete.

In this episode:

• Why the grocery anchor is still the traffic engine of the shopping center
• What Kevin looks at in the first hour of evaluating a new market
• The difference between a site's demographics on paper and what the ingress-egress actually looks like
• Why cell-phone traffic data is "10 pieces of a 20-piece jigsaw puzzle"
• What HEB is doing in Texas that most national grocers can't replicate
• The regional grocer comeback — and why understanding the local customer still wins
• The one thing landlords and developers most often get wrong about grocery anchors

About the guest

Kevin Bissell is SVP Real Estate Research at CRE360 Partners. Before joining CRE360, Kevin led research at Weingarten Realty for 17 years and spent five years at MTN, the industry's premier grocery analytics firm. He's completed grocery sales forecasts and market studies for retailers, landlords, developers, and municipalities across all 50 states.

About the show

The Ground Truth is a podcast for retail real estate operators, executives, and decision-makers. New episodes every two weeks. Hosted by Mike Law.

Sponsored by CRE360 Partners — a retail real estate research and advisory firm helping retailers, landlords, and municipalities make better expansion and leasing decisions.

Creators and Guests

Host

Mike Law

Mike has been in the real estate & capital-raise marketing business for more than 25 years. His friendly, enthusiastic demeanor and passion for marketing have enabled him to build high-powered teams and play an irreplaceable role in the growth of several companies over his career.

Guest

Kevin Bissell

Kevin brings over 35 years of real estate research and site selection experience to the CRE 360 team. His expertise in the grocery industry began in college at Lucky Foods in Southern California. After earning a master’s degree, he joined American Stores in Buena Park, CA, as a Real Estate Research Analyst. Following the consolidation, he moved to Salt Lake City as a Senior Analyst. After American Stores was acquired by Albertsons, Kevin managed the Drug Store team in site research in Boise, ID. His REIT experience started in Houston, TX, with Weingarten Realty Investors, where he held positions as New Development Director and Director of Research during his nearly 17-year tenure. He later joined MTN Advisors, overseeing site location research for grocers and retailers. Throughout his career, Kevin has collaborated with grocers, shopping center owners, developers, and brokers to meet their research needs. At CRE 360 Partners, he leads a team of analysts to support clients in achieving growth. Kevin holds a master’s degree in Geography from California State University Long Beach and has been a member of the ICSC North American Research Group since 2017.

What is The Ground Truth?

The retail real estate business runs on data. But without judgment, field experience, and the right framework, data is just noise.

The Ground Truth is where host Mike Law sits down with retail real estate operators, researchers, and executives to cut through that noise — and equip retailers, landlords, developers, and municipalities to make better decisions about where they build, lease, and invest.

Each episode goes deep on the forces shaping retail markets right now: what grocery anchors are actually doing, how expansion strategies win or fail in the field, where trade areas are shifting, and why the most valuable intelligence still comes from walking the store, not pulling the dashboard.

If you're a retailer planning your next 20 sites, a landlord repositioning a center, a developer underwriting a deal, or a municipality trying to attract the right tenants — this is the conversation you want to listen in on.

New episodes every two to three weeks.

Mike Law: 00:05

Hello, and welcome to The Ground Truth. If you're in the retail commercial real estate business, you already know that our business runs on data. But without judgment, without field experience, and without the right framework for interpreting it, well, that's just noise. The Ground Truth is where we try and cut through the noise and equip you as real estate operators, executives, and managers to simply make better decisions. My name is Mike Law, and I'll be your host for today's episode.

Mike Law: 00:35

Let's go ahead and jump right in. I want to start with the topic that underpins more real estate decisions than any other, the grocery anchor. In an era where everyone's talking about e commerce delivery apps and the death of physical retail, the grocery anchored shopping center just keeps pushing and just keeps outperforming. And the person I want to talk to about why is someone who has spent more than thirty years figuring out exactly how grocery markets work from the inside. Kevin Bissell is senior vice president of real estate research at CRE360 Partners.

Mike Law: 01:10

Kevin, welcome to The Ground Truth. Tell us who you are. And I mean the real version, not the LinkedIn version.

Kevin Bissell: 01:17

Yeah. Hi, Mike. Thank you very much for having me. I've been doing grocery research for close to thirty five years. Basically started in the stores, worked my way up and went into the real estate office in Buena Park, California, doing food and drug research for American Stores.

Kevin Bissell: 01:38

Then moved to Boise, Idaho. Still doing research for American Stores. We were acquired by Albertsons. So thirteen years at American Stores and Albertsons doing grocery and drug research. I joined Weingarten Realty for seventeen years.

Kevin Bissell: 01:53

So working for a shopping center owner developer and then on to MTN, which was the premier grocery analytics company in the country for five years. And now it's CRE three sixty doing grocery research.

Mike Law: 02:07

Well, thank you for the introduction. All right. Let's go ahead and get right into it. So we live in a world where you can order groceries to your door and usually less than a couple of hours. My wife does grocery orders and, you know, pick up orders all the time.

Mike Law: 02:24

Streaming killed the the video store and blockbuster. E commerce has really beat down apparel and and Amazon is is putting a real dent in just about everything else. So, Kevin, will you make the case for us? Why does a physical grocery store still matter so much to a shopping center here in 2026?

Kevin Bissell: 02:45

Yeah. It's funny. Before COVID happened, you know, there was a lot of talk that grocery was gonna go away. I was actually on an analyst tour in Nashville where I heard an analyst say, that he didn't think there would be grocery stores within ten years. And that was that was over ten years ago and there's still a lot of grocery stores, still more coming.

Kevin Bissell: 03:06

So, you know, it's always the last mile. This is where you're going do your online pickup, in your ordering, for the grocery stores. They are viable. And I think COVID really proved it that you need grocery. You know, it's a necessity needs, and I believe there are always gonna be a place for grocers.

Kevin Bissell: 03:26

Some people don't like, having their groceries ordered and other people picking them, especially the meat and the vegetables. So I think there's always gonna be a need for grocery grocery store.

Mike Law: 03:38

But let's think about it through the lens of a landlord. What happens when grocery goes dark?

Kevin Bissell: 03:44

Yeah. So, you know, landlords, shopping center owners, they like grocery because it is by far the most repeat business. Weekly trips are about 1.2 a week. So that's a traffic generator that's driving, the traffic into the center. So it is the most important part of the that shopping center.

Kevin Bissell: 04:06

When a grocer goes dark, all the tenants feel it. They're losing all that traffic. So that's why the grocers are the key element in the grocery store or in the shopping center. You wanna build the shopping center around that grocer and keep them viable and happy and healthy.

Mike Law: 04:23

That's a great foundation to kind of lead through the rest of our conversation here. I want to try and pull back the curtain a little bit on the research side because I know that's near and dear to your heart. It's where CRE360 operates every day and where your expertise really lives. When you first step foot into a new market, whether you're evaluating a site for a developer or a retailer, maybe a municipality, what are you actually looking for? Like what tells you in those first moments or hours, whether there's a real, you know, it's kind of tangible opportunity here or whether maybe whether the market's already spoken for or there's just not an actual opportunity here.

Mike Law: 05:04

Like what are you looking for when you step on the ground?

Kevin Bissell: 05:07

Yeah. Great question, Mike. The first thing I always start with even before I deployed to the field is, I look at the demographics. I try to understand the trade area demographics, you know, what the incomes are, the education levels, the different ethnicities, if the market's growing or shrinking, those are all critical to what a grocer is gonna look at also. Once I get out into the field and we're going into all the grocery stores, we're looking at the operations of each of the grocery store.

Kevin Bissell: 05:39

They doing a good job? Are the stores clean? What's the ingress, egress to the centers? Just a number of things. Then what departments are in the store?

Kevin Bissell: 05:47

What the format of the store is? And what I mean by format, you know, twenty years ago, basically all grocery for conventional grocery, you know, with a meat department produce and maybe a bakery deli, but there's been a diffusion of that. You have specialty grocers, you have quality service grocers, you have discounters, and then you have, you know, supercenters that are taking a lot of the grocery business and even the mass merchants, Costco, Target are are are pulling a lot of dollars out of the grocery. So it's it's basically understanding, you know, the demographics of the market first and then getting out and seeing the operations, how the stores are functioning in the market and who's missing. That's always the key to doing the site work is who's missing and who would be a good fit into that market.

Mike Law: 06:37

Let me ask you kind of the piggyback on that. What do you think that people miss most often when they're trying to read the market without that boots on the ground lens? What's what are the common misses that retailers or developers or or municipalities might miss?

Kevin Bissell: 06:55

Well, there's there's a lot and it's happened to me too. You know, I always do my prep work. Like I said, I look at the demographics and then, you know, look at an aerial, the the site, the store. And a lot of times I get to the center and I'm surprised. The ingress egress can be difficult or, you know, when you thought it was gonna be easy or vice versa.

Kevin Bissell: 07:14

I remember looking at a store that we were trying to acquire when I was at Weingarten in Seattle and just looked at the area and didn't realize till I got there that it was very, very hilly landscape and that it was actually a two story store. There was a some retail on the bottom that faced the back of the store. It was one of the weirdest things I've ever encountered. And I just recently went on a trip to West Virginia to do a site that was an acquisition site, so we were hired by a developer to look at a store, a shopping center that they were looking to acquire. And I had been to West Virginia before, but it's been a long time and I forgot how rugged the terrain is and how very hard it is to find a good location.

Kevin Bissell: 07:59

And this one fit all those all the bills. You know, was a very strong location that it had a regional pull, even though it was kind of a minor grocer. It's gonna be very viable and barriers for entry all over the place. So it's it's one of those things that you really gotta dig into it. And a lot of times you only find those things out when you're actually on the ground going into the store.

Mike Law: 08:26

Those are good stories you shared too, and I couldn't agree more. Let me ask, maybe you could walk me and our listeners through a deal. You know, you can redact the names if you need to, but really where the research fundamentally changed the direction of what was intended to happen.

Kevin Bissell: 08:43

Yeah. It happened quite a bit when I was at Weingarten. You know, I was head of research at Weingarten and we would be the first ones to usually see an acquisition. And it got to the point where the acquisitions were literally taking over the process that and what I mean by that is people were falling in love with the center before they had even visited or had seen it. And it got to the point where they were having us go on and look at it first because what happens is you get the whole company kind of rolling behind.

Kevin Bissell: 09:16

It's like a coiled spring. And so everybody gets interested in the site. And if you can give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down early, it saves a lot of time and energy of the company. So we would go out and look at sites and go, wow. This is just I remember going to one in Knoxville that we were very interested in.

Kevin Bissell: 09:35

Got out there. It was at the end of the road, very tough to get into. You couldn't see it. And I was able to make a phone call and get the deal killed right then and there. And getting deals killed is not a bad thing.

Kevin Bissell: 09:48

It it can be a good thing. You know, we always say that people, you know, the the these deals are their baby. And sometimes you have to say, hey, your baby's ugly and we just gotta move on. And then other times we've done the reverse. We've gone to sites that we thought were marginal and we are able to dig into it and figure it out.

Kevin Bissell: 10:09

Kind of like the one I just went to in West Virginia. You know, my first belief that it was somewhat of a marginal site, but when I got out there and understood the topography and the barriers for entry, this is a great acquisition. So, know, it goes both ways. And we always try and go into any kind of endeavor or site visit with an open mind. I mean, you can have conclusions looking at the demographics and understanding it.

Kevin Bissell: 10:34

But when you get in the field and you're seeing, you know, the boots on the ground and you're seeing what's actually happening, that's when you really make the decisions.

Mike Law: 10:42

Like you said, sometimes it's not pretty, and I'm sure sometimes you're probably not the most popular guy in the room when you're delivering bad news about someone's baby, but it's valuable nonetheless. We're gonna take a short break for a word from our sponsors. We'll be right back. This episode of The Ground Truth is brought to you by CRE three sixty Partners. Retail real estate decisions are too expensive to make on intuition, a bad site, a misread trade area or a tenant that doesn't fit.

Mike Law: 11:15

Those mistakes show up on the p and l for years, CRE three sixty pairs rigorous market research with full transaction execution. So retailers, landlords, and municipalities make decisions backed by data. Research driven, transaction ready. Make better decisions with CRE three sixty partners. Learn more at cre-360.com.

Mike Law: 11:39

Alright, we're back. Let's zoom out a little bit more. The market data heading into 2026 is, is pretty interesting. Grocery Anchors Centers are being called out by JPMorgan, CBRE and others among the best risk adjusted plays in CRE right now. New construction near historic lows.

Mike Law: 12:00

Occupancy still remains tight. Kevin, from where you sit, what's happening in grocery anchored retail right now that you think most people in industry maybe aren't paying close enough attention to?

Kevin Bissell: 12:16

Yeah. So again, as you said, grocery anchored retail is by far the strongest channel right now. Everybody's interested in it. What what I'm seeing is kind of smaller centers be being the hot item now, something with a a very good grocer and smaller shop space so they can keep that leased. I view the future as grocery is going to keep evolving as it always has done.

Kevin Bissell: 12:40

It's funny. I read an English newspaper and they're kind of negative on the retail environment right now in America, and one of the criticisms was Kroger just hired a new CEO and they were saying that they're copying Walmart. And I got a chuckle out of that because all grocers copy. I don't think there's one grocer that doesn't copy another grocer. So, you know, it used to be you would walk into a grocer and they would have coffee in the bakery.

Kevin Bissell: 13:08

You know, somebody started rotisserie chicken, so everybody had rotisserie chicken. Somebody had prepared foods, so they're all doing prepared foods. So grocery copies itself and it's always evolving and they're always trying to find that next item that's going to appeal to the customer.

Mike Law: 13:26

It's definitely the the darling in the CRE industry right now. Are there any like regional stories that stand out to you either markets or maybe even regional grocers that are worth watching these days?

Kevin Bissell: 13:44

Yeah, you know, course, regional grocer only because they're here in Texas. HEB just growing like crazy in Texas and doing a very good job. I always like regional grocers and the fact is that regional grocers have to be good. They may not have the best pricing because they don't have the buying ability of a Kroger or an Albertsons, but they typically have their fingers on the pulse of the community. They they know what the community wants much better.

Kevin Bissell: 14:16

So if if you go into these these large, know, national chains, you can be in Southern California or on the East Coast and you're gonna see the same product on the shelf Where regional grocers able to basically go after the market that they're in and really, you know, meet the needs of those those customers. I was just in Louisiana doing another study and I was surprised at how many independent small grocers were there. And the need is basically because they had some regional or national chains there. One very strong regional chain that was doing a good job, but the smaller independents were filling that need. It's, you know, a lot of Cajun and Creole in Louisiana, and they were filling that need that the the big national chains weren't doing.

Kevin Bissell: 15:05

So I always say or look at the regionals as they can be a very strong player in certain markets. And again, it's because they understand their customer and have their their pulse, you know, fingers on the pulse of those customers knowing what they want and they're they better serve their customers than a large national chain does.

Mike Law: 15:24

I love it. And, you know, this has been a great conversation. I think it's a good reminder that the fundamentals in this sector are strong, but they reward the people who actually do the work to understand them. So last question here. For a landlord or developer sitting across from you today trying to make a decision about a grocery anchor, what's the one thing that you think they're most likely to get wrong or to misunderstand?

Mike Law: 15:50

Maybe one or two things.

Kevin Bissell: 15:52

Yeah. So, you know, again, we're a boots on the ground organization. We go out and we understand the site and the grocer. You can go into a marketing and it can have five sister stores and we're grading each one of the stores trying to figure out which one's the best, the strength of that store. You know, a lot of people are using traffic data, cell phone data right now, and it's a great tool.

Kevin Bissell: 16:16

We love it. We use it to define trade areas, but it's not the end all be all. It only goes so far. It's just another I always tell people it's like a a site is like a jigsaw puzzle. And sometimes that traffic data gives you 10 parts of that 20 piece jigsaw puzzle.

Kevin Bissell: 16:33

Other times it gives you two or three. So we're we're taking the full approach. We use traffic data and we're using the boots on the ground to come up with the decision that best educates that shopping center owner or, you know, acquisitions prospect. And we believe that's the best approach. There's nothing better than talking to people in a store and getting the feedback on what they think the store is doing and and how well it's performing in the market.

Mike Law: 17:02

This is exactly what I was hoping for Kevin and, you know, thirty years of experience and and you make it sound like common sense, which is the point of this whole podcast. For anyone listening who's working through a site decision, trying to position a center or just trying to understand how grocery markets actually move, this is the kind of intelligence that our friends at CRE360 Partners brings to the table every single day. You can learn more about them at cre360.com. That's cre360.com. If something Kevin said today is relevant to a decision you're facing, go ahead and reach out.

Mike Law: 17:43

That conversation is worth having. Our friends there at CRE360 would be happy to chat with you. This has been The Ground Truth with Kevin Bissle and your host. I'm Mike Law saying thanks for listening. Hope you guys have a great day.