Drive south on 25th East past Hitt Road on a weekday afternoon and you will pass a parking lot that barely existed two years ago, a drive-through window still shiny with new paint, and a stretch of pavement that Eastern Idaho's commercial brokers have started calling something specific: Retail Row.
Most people who live near it assume the corridor works the way retail growth usually works around here, that Idaho Falls gets the new chain first and Ammon gets the overflow a year or two later. The opposite just happened. When a fast-casual chain out of Utah decided it was finally ready for the eastern side of the state, it did not open its first location downtown or along Yellowstone Highway. It opened it here, in Ammon, on a corner most residents still know by what used to sit there.
A corridor that already earned a nickname
The stretch of South 25th East running past Hitt Road has been building toward this for a while. Commercial listings for the area now describe it as Idaho Falls' "Retail Row," a strip anchored by Bass Pro Shops, the store still known to a lot of locals by its old name, Cabela's, along with Hobby Lobby. The same listing points out something that matters more than the store names: the corridor sits within reach of two hospitals, the College of Eastern Idaho, and a regional mall, which means daytime traffic here does not depend on whether school is in session or whether it is a weekend.
That combination, steady daytime population plus room to build, is what turned an ordinary retail strip into a place where developers now bet on something new before they bet on downtown.
What actually opened this year
The newest bet is Foothills Square, a retail center built by Ball Ventures with partner Woodbury Corporation, sitting just south of Culver's and that same Bass Pro Shops building on 25th East. Its first tenant, Café Zupas, held its grand opening on January 15, 2026. According to East Idaho News, it was the first Café Zupas location anywhere on the eastern side of Idaho, and the company has announced plans for two more in the region.
Tahri Molifua, Ball Ventures' president of real estate, put the intent behind the project plainly when the opening was announced:
"As the first Café Zupas on this side of the state, this opening highlights our vision for Foothills Square as a hub for exciting, diverse and high-quality retail experiences."
That sentence is doing more work than it looks like. A regional real estate company chose to introduce a brand-new-to-Idaho restaurant concept in Ammon rather than in the larger, more established commercial core a few miles north. That is not an accident of geography. It is a bet on the corridor itself.
Why the corridor tests brands before Idaho Falls does
Here is the part that surprises people who have lived in Ammon for years and still think of it as the quieter, residential side of the metro. The retail expansion pattern here has flipped. New concepts are choosing Ammon's Hitt Road and 25th East corridor as their entry point into Eastern Idaho, not as their second stop after proving themselves downtown.
A few things line up to make that true:
- Land is available in usable chunks. Foothills Square was built as a planned center with pad sites ready for ground lease, the kind of flexible footprint a national chain wants for a first location.
- The daytime population is built in, not seasonal. Two hospitals and the College of Eastern Idaho keep foot traffic steady on weekdays, which matters more to a fast-casual concept than weekend mall traffic.
- The existing anchors already did the work of proving the corridor. Bass Pro Shops and Hobby Lobby were pulling regional shoppers to this stretch of 25th East long before Foothills Square broke ground, which lowered the risk for the next tenant to sign a lease.
None of that shows up if you just drive the strip once. It shows up when you notice that the newest restaurant concept in the region opened here first, not in the city with the bigger population number.
What it means on an ordinary Wednesday
If you already live along this stretch, the practical version of all this is simple. The Albertsons at 1901 South 25th East is still the neighborhood grocery run it has always been. Culver's and Bass Pro Shops are still the landmarks people use for directions. What changed is what sits between them and what that says about how the corridor is read from the outside.
The next time a friend visiting from out of town asks where to eat near the Bass Pro Shops end of Ammon, you now have an answer that did not exist a year ago, and a small piece of local knowledge to go with it: this particular half mile of 25th East is where national brands are choosing to test Eastern Idaho first. That is not a story about traffic patterns or square footage. It is a story about which neighborhood a national company trusts enough to bet on before anywhere else in the region.
If you are watching Ammon for reasons that go beyond dinner plans, whether that is a home you are thinking about listing or a sense of where the neighborhood is heading next, Abigail Martin Real Estate tracks these shifts as closely as the market data itself. A free home valuation is one way to start that conversation, but so is a call about what a corner like this one means for a street a few blocks over.
