Wright's Gourmet House, the cafe, deli, and bakery that has operated from a single storefront at 1200 S Dale Mabry Hwy since 1963, is planning its first locations beyond South Tampa. Under Caspers Company — the Tampa-based operator behind Oxford Exchange, which acquired Wright's in 2024 — the brand is targeting hub-style shops in Brandon and Wesley Chapel, with openings planned for 2027 and 2028 respectively.
The expansion marks a structural shift for a business that spent more than six decades as a neighborhood anchor on one of South Tampa's primary commercial corridors. Wright's built its following across those years around deli sandwiches, baked goods, and catering — the kind of repeat-customer operation that rarely survives an ownership transition intact, let alone one that arrives with growth plans attached. The 2024 Caspers acquisition was an early signal that the new ownership had broader ambitions for the brand.
A first indication of that direction came earlier in 2026, when Caspers opened a satellite Wright's cafe at Tampa General Hospital — a limited-footprint format that tested the brand's ability to operate outside its Dale Mabry home base. The Brandon and Wesley Chapel locations, described by the operator as hub-style shops, are planned as fuller buildouts: each will carry a cafe, catering operations, and a market component, a format more closely aligned with what the original Dale Mabry storefront has offered for six decades than the hospital satellite does.
Caspers Company brings operational depth to the expansion. Best known locally for Oxford Exchange — the bookstore, restaurant, and event venue anchoring a block in Downtown Tampa — the group has built its hospitality footprint around businesses that blend food service, retail, and event programming. That experience maps onto the Wright's model, where catering and packaged goods have always run alongside the counter and cafe business, in ways a more conventional restaurant operator might not replicate.
Brandon and Wesley Chapel are among the fastest-growing residential corridors in the Tampa Bay region, markets where established food names from the city's core have historically been underrepresented. For Wright's, whose name recognition runs deepest in South Tampa households, the suburban push is less a departure than an expansion of the base — a bet that the brand travels far enough to hold in communities where its long-standing customers have increasingly relocated.
The timeline — Brandon in 2027, Wesley Chapel in 2028 — suggests Caspers is pacing the rollout deliberately rather than stacking openings. The schedule was announced by the operator; permit filings and executed leases have not been confirmed through public records. The Brandon location, now roughly 18 months out, will be the first test of whether the Wright's model — built across six decades in a single South Tampa neighborhood — holds outside the corridor that built it.
