On a Friday evening at 201 East Main Street, folding tables line up under the John Q. Thompson City Pavilion, and the smell of something fried drifts past a family walking a dog. This is the Troy Farmers Market, and until recently it only ran on Saturdays, and only once a month. Now there's a second version of it on Friday nights, running from February through November. If you're looking for the town's one big grocery store while you're here, you won't find it. Troy still doesn't have one. What it has instead is a town that appears to have stopped waiting.
That's the part worth sitting with. Troy has grown faster than almost anywhere else in Bell County over the last several years, and the retail chain that usually shows up first when a small town swells, a full-line grocery store, still hasn't arrived. What has arrived is smaller, more local, and in some ways more interesting than a supermarket would have been.
The Growth Nobody Can Miss
The 2020 Census put Troy's population at 2,375. By early 2025, city officials were describing a 51 percent increase since that count. Population estimates for 2026 put the city at roughly 3,840, which works out to nearly 60 percent growth in six years, with the city adding residents at a rate of just over 7 percent a year. For a town this size, that's not incremental change. That's a town that looked one way in 2020 and looks like a different town now.
Retail is supposed to follow rooftops. In most fast-growing Texas suburbs, a grocery chain shows up once the math works, once there are enough driveways within a few miles to justify the square footage. Troy has cleared that population threshold according to residents and city officials who've pushed for it, but the grocery store still hasn't materialized. The city passed on a Brookshire Brothers before 2019, a decision several residents now point to as a missed window. Since then, the closest full grocery options have been in Temple or Waco, both a 20 to 30 minute drive each way.
The Deal That Keeps Almost Happening
City officials have been in talks with a mom-and-pop grocer out of Waco, according to reporting from late 2024, though no name or opening date has been announced. The Greater Troy Chamber has pushed the issue hard enough to form the city's first Economic Development Committee, aimed at using tools like property tax abatements and permitting assistance to make Troy more attractive to the kind of retail residents actually want. Chamber leaders have been candid that the demographics make the case: a meaningful share of Troy's population is older or without reliable transportation, which turns a grocery run into a real logistical problem rather than a minor errand.
None of that has produced a grand opening yet. What it has produced is a town that decided not to wait around for one company's real estate calculus to resolve itself.
What Actually Filled Main Street
While the grocery conversation stayed stuck, small businesses moved fast. Troy Fitness and Scribbles Frozen Yogurt both opened within weeks of each other in early 2025, positioned across the street from one another so members and customers could realistically use both in one trip. Troy Nutrition, run by owner Haven Ramirez, has been coordinating cross-promotions with the new gym rather than treating it as competition. Down the block, Jalisco's has been serving Main Street from 213 Main Street for years, and Gaby's Gotcha Professional Organizing runs out of 302 East Main.
That last business is worth a second look, because its owner shows up in three different roles that usually belong to three different people in a town this size. Gaby Warlick owns the organizing business, serves as President of the Greater Troy Chamber of Commerce, and founded the Troy Enterprise Press, the town's own news outlet. In a lot of communities, those functions are spread across a business owner, an elected chamber board, and a legacy newspaper with its own separate ownership. In Troy, one person is doing all three, which says something about how small and tightly wound the town's civic layer still is even as its population climbs toward four thousand.
The town's amateur historian, Randy Thompson, writes a column for that same paper and started the Troy Historical Society's Facebook page a couple of years back, after retiring from a career that took him from teaching to running a wedding and event rental business. The Temple Area Beekeepers Association meets the second Thursday of every month at the Troy Community Center, working through practical seasonal topics like winterizing hives before the cold sets in. None of this reads like a supermarket opening. All of it reads like a town building its own social infrastructure at the same time its retail infrastructure is still catching up.
The Market Learned to Run Twice a Week
The clearest evidence of that pattern is the farmers market itself, because you can watch it grow in real time.
- First Saturday, April through August: The original Troy Farmers Market and Arts & Crafts market, held at the John Q. Thompson City Pavilion, 201 East Main Street, running 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. It's been going since 2011, organized by volunteer Laurie Bailey, with no vendor fees charged for space under the pavilion or inside the community center.
- Friday evenings, February through November: The newer "Evening at Troy-TX Market," an expansion of the same effort, running 5 to 7 p.m. at the same address, described by organizers as a smaller-scale version with a mix of local food and small businesses.
Two markets a year ago would have been one. That's not a subtle shift. A town this size doesn't add a second weekly commercial gathering unless there's real demand pulling it into existence, and Troy Fitness, Scribbles, and Troy Nutrition opening within the same stretch of months suggests the demand isn't limited to produce and crafts. People are showing up for reasons that have nothing to do with waiting on a supermarket to open.
The Argument Underneath the Growth
Not everyone in Troy agrees on how fast this should be happening. A proposed subdivision off Old Highway 81 has been tabled three times by City Council, with infrastructure and water capacity cited as the sticking points each time. Resident Tammy Ramirez, speaking to a local TV crew about the standoff, said she supports the small business growth happening in town and thinks growth overall is good for Troy. That's a common position here: enthusiasm for what's filling in on Main Street, paired with real caution about whether the pipes and water system can keep up with what comes next.
That tension is the actual story, more than any single ribbon cutting. Troy's population curve outpaced the arrival of a grocery chain, and it's also outpacing, at least for now, the city's ability to green-light new rooftops without a fight at the council table. The businesses that have opened, the market that doubled its schedule, the chamber president who also runs the newspaper, all of that is what a town looks like when it's growing faster than the systems meant to support growth can move.
If you already live here, you've probably felt this without naming it. The drive to Temple or Waco for groceries hasn't gotten any shorter. But Main Street on a Friday night looks different than it did two years ago, and that difference is worth more attention than the grocery store that still hasn't shown up.
For anyone thinking through what a fast-growing Bell County town like Troy actually looks like day to day, not just on a spreadsheet, Bradley Sheppard has spent years tracking these shifts across Temple, Belton, and the smaller towns around them. If you have questions about Troy or any of the communities nearby, get in touch.
