Great Park Neighborhoods Finally Gets the Errand Run Woodbury Has Had for Years
September 17, 2026
September 17, 2026
For as long as most Great Park Neighborhoods residents have lived here, running errands has meant getting in the car. Groceries meant a drive to Tustin or over to Woodbury. A quick burger meant Campus Drive, fifteen minutes each way if traffic cooperated. That changed on September 4, when a second In-N-Out opened at 7900 Great Park Blvd inside a new shopping center called The Canopy, the first location of the chain to sit inside Great Park Neighborhoods itself rather than a drive from it.
The burger stand is not really the story. The story is what it represents: this corner of Irvine, built fast and built well, is only now getting the kind of everyday commercial core that older Irvine villages have had for more than a decade. Woodbury, a few miles north, had Trader Joe's, Ralphs, LA Fitness, Chick-fil-A and a Home Depot anchoring its town center almost from the start. Great Park Neighborhoods got parks, schools and sports fields first, and waited on the grocery store.
The In-N-Out at The Canopy seats 84 people indoors and another 34 on the patio, with a drive-thru lane built into the design. It opened with roughly 70 associates and plans to keep hiring through the fall. Starting pay is $22 an hour, two dollars above California's mandated wage floor for fast-food chains with at least 60 locations statewide, a detail that says something about how competitive Irvine's hourly labor market has gotten as more retail comes online at once.
In-N-Out is only one anchor. The Canopy itself is a 12-acre, 90,000-square-foot outdoor retail and dining project from Almquist Development, the same firm behind River Street Marketplace in San Juan Capistrano and Rodeo 39 Public Market in Stanton. Construction broke ground in April 2025, and the center is being built out in phases rather than all at once, which is why residents are seeing tenants arrive a few at a time rather than in one grand opening.
The bigger anchor, at least by square footage, is still to come. T&T Supermarket, Canada's largest Asian grocery chain, is building its first Southern California location in Building 2 at 7100 Great Park Blvd, a 34,000-square-foot store expected to open before the end of the year. The company says the store will create 180 jobs and will run a self-serve hot bar with Peking duck, a barbecue station and a sushi counter, alongside made-to-order Chinese crepes and Taiwanese-style rice rolls. T&T CEO Tina Lee has said the company is eager to "surprise our shoppers with a unique shopping experience" once the doors open. Beyond In-N-Out and T&T, Philz Coffee, The Taco Stand, H&H Bagels and SHOOTZ are also slated for The Canopy, arriving in stages through 2027.
Great Park Neighborhoods is one of the fastest-growing pockets of Irvine, built on the footprint of the old Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, and it has spent years growing around its parks and its sports complex rather than around a shopping street. The Great Park Sports Complex alone draws more than 8 million visitors a year, which is a remarkable number for a neighborhood that, until this month, had nowhere close by to grab dinner before or after a game. Local coverage of the Canopy project has made a point of noting that the neighborhood spent years developing without any real retail center to call its own, and that tracks with what residents have said for years: the homes came first, the amenities came second, and the everyday errands stayed several miles away.
Compare that to Woodbury, an older Irvine village where homes went up mostly in the 2000s and where Trader Joe's, Ralphs, LA Fitness and a cluster of family restaurants have anchored the town center at 6200 to 6460 Irvine Boulevard for most of that time. Woodbury residents have had a full grocery-and-errand loop within walking or biking distance for years. Great Park Neighborhoods is only catching up to that model now, with a burger stand as the first domino and a full-scale grocery store still weeks away.
The commercial buildout is one thread. The other is a genuinely busy month on the community calendar, the kind that only makes sense if you already live close enough to walk to it.
Yesterday, the fifth annual Fiesta Latina en Irvine filled the Great Park with lotería games, calavera makeup demonstrations, live music and dance as part of Hispanic Heritage Month programming. This week and next bring a run of events that give a real sense of what daily life looks like right now, not in some evergreen sense but this specific September:
None of this requires a car if you live in Great Park Neighborhoods. That is a fairly new sentence to be able to write about this part of Irvine.
The Canopy is not finished. Almquist has said the center will keep opening in phases into 2027, and the T&T store, once it lands, will be the first true full-service grocery store inside the neighborhood's own boundaries rather than a drive away in Tustin or Woodbury. The future 133 Freeway interchange planned nearby will eventually make the center easier to reach from outside Great Park Neighborhoods too, which is likely to bring more retail interest to the remaining Canopy suites.
For residents, the practical shift is smaller than the headlines about billion-dollar master planning suggest, but it is real. A trip that used to mean fifteen minutes on Sand Canyon now means a short walk or a two-minute drive. A neighborhood that has spent years being defined by its parks and its sports fields is finally getting the kind of everyday commercial anchor that makes a place feel finished rather than still under construction.
If you are weighing what any of this means for your own plans in Great Park Neighborhoods, whether that is a renovation before a sale or simply understanding how a new retail corridor might affect your property's position in the market, Lena Ghezel works this stretch of Coastal Orange County closely and is glad to talk through what you are seeing on the ground. Request Your Home Valuation whenever you are ready for that conversation.
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