Target opens $367 million Colorado grocery distribution center

Target’s $367 million grocery hub in Thornton is aimed at the part of the business store teams feel every day: whether the milk, produce and pantry staples show up on time and in the right quantity. The 529,000-square-foot, temperature-controlled center is designed to move food through Target’s network faster, with the company saying it can replenish 129 stores across 11 states up to two days sooner than before.

The facility opened June 1 at 15450 Washington St., near Interstate 25 and E-470, and it is Target’s largest food distribution center to date. It is also the retailer’s ninth food distribution center overall and its fourth food facility opened in about three years. Target expects the site to employ about 383 workers, a scale that suggests the building is meant to do more than add warehouse space. It is meant to change how fast stores can recover from empty shelves, promotional spikes and unpredictable demand.

A key feature is consolidation. Instead of shipping separate vendor loads down the line, the Thornton center can combine those shipments into full truckloads before they move on to stores. That should reduce transportation volume, shorten unloading time and lower distribution costs. For store teams, the practical effect could be fewer fragmented deliveries and less time spent dealing with partial grocery shipments in the back room, while also putting more pressure on receiving and replenishment crews to turn faster store-level execution into better shelf availability.

The investment fits into Target’s broader 2026 growth plan, which calls for about $5 billion in capital investment and another $1 billion in operating investment for store remodels, new stores, technology and supply-chain upgrades. The retailer has been leaning harder into food as a traffic driver, saying more than half of guests have food in their baskets. Cara Sylvester has said Target is carrying out its largest food transition in more than a decade, including a reset of nearly half of the center-store grocery assortment.

That push has already shown up in sales. Target added 3,000 new food items in the first quarter of 2026, and sales from those items were up more than 50% compared with the prior assortment. In the same period, net sales rose 6.7% and comparable traffic grew 4.4%, giving the company fresh reason to keep investing in grocery as a reason to visit stores more often. The Thornton center also deepens Target’s Colorado footprint, which began outside Minnesota in Glendale in 1966, and turns the state into a more important logistics node for the chain’s food business.