Sarasota Square's Own Numbers Push Whole Foods Into 2027, Not 2026

Mike Wayne used to bring his son to the Sarasota Square Mall for Boy Scout events back when the place still had working escalators and a food court. Now he drives past a construction site where the mall used to be, watching the last of the enclosed corridors come down. "It won't be giant hallways and corridors," he said, describing what he expects to find when the site reopens.

What he expects and what's actually scheduled turn out to be two different timelines, and the gap between them is the part worth untangling if you live anywhere near Palmer Ranch.

For most of 2025, the story that circulated locally was simple: Whole Foods is coming to the old Sarasota Square site, and it's coming in 2026. That's what early marketing materials first suggested when the anchor tenant surfaced over the summer, and it's still the year printed on a handful of aggregator sites that have never been updated. But once the developer put its own name on an actual date, the picture changed. Torburn Partners, the Illinois-based firm that owns the redevelopment, issued a press release on May 14, 2026, alongside its leasing partner Jamestown, confirming that Phase 1, the phase that includes Whole Foods, is targeted for the first quarter of 2027. Bay News 9's construction update from August 28, 2026 lines up with that, reporting that phase one will be finished "next year," which from where we're sitting in late September 2026 means early 2027 by any reading of the calendar.

For the roughly 30,000 residents inside Palmer Ranch's boundaries, plus everyone else in the 34238 zip code who passes the demolition on US-41 and Beneva Road on the way home, that distinction matters more than it sounds. A store opening this year changes a weekly routine almost immediately. A store opening in the first quarter of next year means one more holiday season and one more spring of driving north to University Town Center or south to Publix GreenWise before there's a new option to actually shop.

What's Confirmed for Phase 1, Down to the Square Foot

Torburn's leasing announcements, first in November 2025 and updated again in May 2026, name seven tenants for the first phase, each with a specific footprint on file:

• Whole Foods Market: 35,828 square feet, the anchor
• HomeSense: 24,214 square feet, home décor and furnishings
• Chipotle Mexican Grill, CAVA Mediterranean, and Joe & The Juice: 7,418 square feet combined
• Charles Schwab: a 5,163-square-foot bank branch
• Warby Parker: 2,040 square feet next to Whole Foods

As of the May 14 announcement, Torburn said the first phase was 88 percent pre-leased, which is likely why the company felt confident enough to attach a specific quarter to the project instead of just a year.

The Timeline Nobody Corrected Until the Developer Did

The gap between "2026" and "Q1 2027" sounds minor until you notice how many local posts still repeat the earlier year. A leasing post from August 2025 predicted delivery sometime in 2026, and several sites picked that up and never revisited it once Torburn published its own numbers nine months later. The May 2026 language is more specific than anything that came before it: a named quarter, tied to a pre-leasing percentage the company was willing to make public.

What's Already Open, No Matter What Happens With the Rest

Not everything at the old mall site is behind construction fencing. Costco and JCPenney sit on separate, freestanding parcels that were never part of the demolition, and both have continued operating normally throughout the teardown, something Bay News 9 confirmed during its August visit to the site. If your Sarasota Square routine already includes a Costco run, nothing about the Whole Foods timeline touches that. The two stores exist on different legal parcels than the rest of the redevelopment, which is also why they were never at risk during demolition.

Phase 2 and the Apartments Are Running on a Longer Clock

Phase 1 is the grocery-and-fast-casual layer. Phase 2 is a different piece of the project: roughly 160,000 square feet of street-oriented shopping and dining wrapped around an outdoor lawn built for events, the part of the plan Torburn CEO Michael Burns described as aiming for "the kind of walkable, experience-driven environment that Sarasota has been waiting for." Bay News 9 puts that piece on a 2028 timeline, with a third construction phase still unscoped beyond it.

The residential component is on its own separate schedule entirely. Torburn sold 4.5 acres to Woodfield Development for a 355-to-360-unit rental building with a parking garage, and as of the May 2026 announcement, groundbreaking was planned for later that summer. That building appears to be a distinct project from the apartments Bay News 9 describes arriving alongside the Phase 2 downtown center, which suggests two separate residential pieces moving on two separate clocks rather than one.

Put plainly, a Palmer Ranch resident wondering how fast this site turns into an actual walk-to-dinner amenity is looking at three different dates: groceries and fast casual in early 2027, the walkable street-front piece around 2028, and a longer horizon for whatever comes after that.

The Traffic Question Locals Are Already Raising

Not every reaction to the project has been anticipation for a new grocery run. Residents already living in Palmer Ranch communities have raised concerns with Bay News 9 about the traffic and noise that come with building apartments directly into an already busy retail corridor on US-41. That concern sits alongside the more common reaction, curiosity about what a modern, open-air version of a mall Wayne remembers as corridors and escalators will actually feel like once the fencing comes down.

Neither reaction changes the calendar. What changes is how residents plan around it. If you've told out-of-town guests that a new Whole Foods is opening any day now at the old mall site, the version that matches the developer's own numbers is early 2027 for groceries, and a longer wait for the rest of what Sarasota Square is planning to become.

Sarasota Square sits just outside the formal boundary lines of Palmer Ranch, but for anyone in the 34238 zip code it has always functioned as the neighborhood's closest retail corridor, and that won't change once the fencing comes down. It will just take longer to reopen than most of the neighborhood currently expects.

Team Dunn keeps a close eye on projects like this one because they shape daily life in Palmer Ranch long before they show up on a listing sheet. If you want the next real update on Sarasota Square's actual opening date, rather than the recycled version still floating around, reach out to Team Dunn.