Texas Footprint Grows
Paris Baguette opened its Missouri City, Texas, bakery café on October 31, marking the brand's 30th location in the state and underscoring the franchise system's aggressive Sun Belt expansion. The unit sits at 6266 Highway 6 inside the Colony Lakes Shopping Center, a Kroger-anchored power strip that gives the café immediate access to an established grocery traffic pattern — a co-tenancy model increasingly favored by foodservice concepts looking to capture routine shopping trips rather than destination visits.
The café is locally owned and operated by franchisee Osman Ulhaq, a hospitality and multi-brand veteran whose résumé spans InterContinental Hotels, Honda and Lexus dealership groups, Yum! Brands, and executive leadership across three Arizona credit unions. Ulhaq's wife, Krystle Ulhaq, serves as Vice President of Talent and Experience for the operation. The couple hired a staff of 45 from within the local trade area — Missouri City, Sienna, Riverstone, Quail Valley, and Lake Olympia — a local-hiring posture that Paris Baguette has leaned into as a community-differentiation strategy. The franchisees also plan charitable partnerships with No Kid Hungry and local food banks.
Scale Story for Operators
With more than 4,000 locations worldwide and 350-plus bakery cafés operating across North America, Paris Baguette's unit economics and brand recognition are increasingly compelling to multi-concept operators evaluating strip-center and inline foodservice formats. The brand's stated target of 1,000 U.S. and Canada doors by 2030 requires sustained net-new openings, and Texas — with its population growth, franchise-friendly regulatory climate, and dense suburban retail corridors — is clearly a core development market.
For grocery-adjacent retail operators and category managers, the Paris Baguette co-tenancy model is worth watching. Bakery-café concepts positioned beside anchor grocers compete directly on fresh bakery, prepared beverages, and grab-and-go occasions — categories where supermarket in-store bakery and foodservice departments have historically struggled to win on experience. As visit frequency to physical grocery stores remains a key traffic driver, landlords and grocery anchors alike are placing foodservice tenants that extend dwell time and basket adjacency. Paris Baguette's blend of handcrafted cakes, artisan coffee, and fresh-baked breads maps closely onto the same consumer need states that fuel grocerant and in-store café investment across the conventional supermarket channel.
What Operators Should Watch
"We're on a mission to reestablish the neighborhood bakery café as the heart of the community across the U.S., and we're excited to see Osman bring this to life in his local trade area," said Darren Tipton, CEO of Paris Baguette.
For grocery and CPG stakeholders, the Missouri City opening is a signal that franchise-driven bakery-café formats are scaling fast enough to warrant attention in trade-area competitive sets. Retailers investing in in-store bakery differentiation and fresh foodservice programming will increasingly find Paris Baguette — and concepts like it — as proximate competitors in suburban strip environments anchored by conventional grocers. How supermarket operators respond, whether through elevated in-store café programs, own-brand artisan bakery SKUs, or loyalty-driven morning beverage occasions, will shape the fresh-perimeter competitive landscape over the next several years.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
