How H-E-B Became Texas' Most Beloved Brand

H-E-B’s quiet acts of kindness are preserving communities and cementing the grocery giant as Texas’ most beloved brand By Michael J. Mooney Illustrations by Chris Gash

When the lights went out at his neighborhood grocery store, Tim Hennessy knew he didn’t have much time. He told his wife, Deb, they should split up to cover more ground before the customers were inevitably asked to leave the premises.

This was the fifth day of the catastrophic freeze that pummeled almost every part of Texas in February 2021. As the state’s energy grid failed to keep up with demand, millions of homes and businesses lost power. Hundreds of people died, and property damage estimates reached the hundreds of billions. The power at the Hennessy house in Leander, just north of Austin, had flickered on and off since the first storm hit on Feb. 13, and—like so many other residents across the state—the family had gone several days without running water.

They’d stocked up on groceries before the roads iced, but Tim, a 63-year-old IT worker, noticed some fresh snow had fallen and figured driving might be slightly less treacherous in the first few hours of the storm. Not knowing when they’d get another opportunity, they had decided to make a quick run to the local H-E-B.

Because of the congestion inside, and a subsequent shortage of carts, the Hennessys couldn’t even enter the store for 20 minutes. Then, just as they’d started piling fruit, eggs, milk, and protein bars into their basket, they heard the jarring ZERRRP sound of the power shutting off. Sure enough, it didn’t take long for a store employee to come by and ask them to head toward the registers.

Even with 20 cashiers on hand, a battalion of carts curled down every aisle. Hundreds of shoppers, clad in layered sweatshirts and puffy winter coats, were all wondering: If the power is out, how are they ringing anyone up?

Tim couldn’t see through the crowd, but he thought there might be employees at the front of each line resorting to pencil and paper.

He doesn’t usually do the grocery shopping in the family, so he turned to Deb and joked, “The one time I come shopping, this is what I get!”

A few minutes later, the line started moving. Tim, still thinking there might be employees typing into battery-powered calculators, noticed that the lines were shrinking quickly.

“Wow,” he told Deb. “These guys are fast!”

When it was their turn at the register, the Hennessys started loading their groceries on the conveyor belt but were told to put the groceries back in the cart. The woman at the register asked if they had alcohol. They didn’t. Then she waved them toward the exits.

“Go home and be safe,” she said.

As the Hennessys looked around at the hundreds of customers—all carrying untold sums of diapers, milk, cans, and jars—it dawned on them what was happening. Deb immediately started tearing up. And when Deb gets emotional, Tim gets emotional.

“It’s not like we needed it,” Tim tells me. “But just the gesture, to let people leave like that—it was very touching.”

Tim HennessyTim Hennessy’s photo from H-E-B in Leander during the 2021 winter freeze went viral online.

The store exit, Tim remembers, suddenly felt like the end of a wedding, with eight or so H-E-B employees forming a tunnel by the door, smiling, waving, and wishing everyone a safe journey. Between the dropping temperatures and the power loss and the hundreds of confused, hungry strangers, the situation could have been bedlam. But the mood heading out to the frozen parking lot was, Tim recalls, “festive.”

H-E-B verified the story on Twitter, but otherwise the company didn’t mention what happened that afternoon in Leander. No press release. No social media videos promoting the store’s incredible generosity or commitment to its community.

Nothing.

It turns out, that’s typical. The San Antonio-based grocery chain has a zealous fandom built on the foundation of products like warm store-made tortillas, Creamy Creations ice cream, and a poblano-green tomato salsa simply called That Green Sauce.

Food & Wine magazine annointed H-E-B America’s best supermarket in 2023, and, that same year, the grocery chain topped a list of 64 iconic Texas brands in a March Madness-style bracket run by Texas Monthly. It’s no wonder then that the store’s motto, repeated in commercials across the state, is: “Here Everything’s Better.” Yet there’s something else that makes the chain popular. Something more than the quality of its produce or private-label offerings.

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The humanity the Hennessys and hundreds of other customers witnessed in Leander is hardly an isolated incident. In fact, it doesn’t take much effort to drum up dozens of examples of H-E-B’s remarkable benevolence all over the state. These include grand gestures that have attracted international attention as well as smaller, quieter acts of kindness that have turned casual shoppers into lifelong H-E-B evangelists.

But the company doesn’t spend a lot of time publicizing these good deeds. In an era rife with shameless self-promotion, the grocery giant’s motivation, it seems, is more complex.

I reached out to their headquarters in San Antonio to inquire about their moment of largesse in Leander, as well as several other examples of unpublicized altruism. H-E-B has more than 400 stores and 154,000 employees. In an Amazon addicted society reliant upon online commerce—where public interfacing has all but vanished—it’s rare to see a chain of this size care so much about its customers. And it’s rarer still to see a for-profit company that doesn’t want to spin its generosity into some marketing opportunity. So, I went to the them with a simple question: What is it about the culture at H-E-B that sets it apart?

After a few weeks, I was told that the company had discussed the matter internally and decided not to comment for this story.

Of course.

Blues on the Green had gotten too big. The massive, free concert series, hosted by Austin City Limits Radio, had never been a lucrative venture. Some years it didn’t even break even. But it’s a beloved summer tradition, and maybe the most Austin gathering in Austin.

Not long after the series started 35 years ago at the Arboretum, it moved to Zilker Park, the gem of the city’s park system. It has since featured local acts including Shakey Graves, Jamestown Revival, Jimmie Vaughan, and Gary Clark Jr. For decades, families have come out with picnic blankets and coolers and basked beneath the glorious Hill Country night skies while listening to local music of all genres. There are no tickets, no gates—just good vibes, great music, and lasting memories.

As the annual crowds grew, though, the logistics of the concerts got more expensive. Bigger staging, more signage, additional police officers hired for security. Without admission fees or beverage sales, putting on the shows became a bigger and more daunting challenge. Traditionally, most of the sponsors and vendors were local mom and pop companies selling ice cream and kombucha—not the national beer and automobile brands typically attached to bigger live music ventures. Unwilling to upend that dynamic, organizers announced in 2024 they wouldn’t be renewing Blues on the Green after more than three decades.

Longtime fans of the series were heartbroken. Following in the wake of closures like Dart Bowl and Threadgill’s in 2020, local newscasts were filled with Austinites lamenting the loss of yet another iconic institution. Plenty even dreaded what a resurrected version of the series might entail: Expensive tickets? Drunken debauchery resulting from the introduction of alcohol sales? Or even worse, some soulless out-of-state corporate sponsorship?

That’s when the organizers got a call from H-E-B.

“They were interested immediately in helping save Blues on the Green,” says Andy Langer, a longtime ACL Radio host and Blues on the Green concert booker. “They came to the table and said, ‘What can we do?’”

The grocery giant not only wanted to save the concert series for a year—it sought to find a way to sustain Blues on the Green in perpetuity. According to Langer, H-E-B initiated conversations with city leaders in Austin, convincing officials to waive certain costs including some permits and security. At no point during the negotiations did the company insist on any self-aggrandizing contingencies.

“They didn’t come in and say, ‘We need the whole stage backdrop to say H-E-B,’” Langer says. “They didn’t make it about them.”

This is the sort of selfless magnanimity I found over and over. And not just with free concerts or groceries.

Courtesy of Blues on the GreenThe summer Blues on the Green concert series in Austin was in danger of ending until H-E-B stepped in to save it in 2024.

As Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas in August 2017, causing massive flooding, power loss, and at least 100 deaths—H-E-B was there to help staunch the damage. Not only did the company fight to keep nearly every store open in areas affected by the storm, H-E-B flew in truckers from other parts of the state and dispatched a convoy of water tankers, mobile pharmacies, kitchens, and business centers. Anyone in the afflicted communities—from Houston to Kingsville—could use the internet to contact relatives; get free, clean water; and have a hot meal served by H-E-B employees.

We do everything we can to not only recover our stores but also recover our communities,” Justen Noakes, H-E-B’s director of emergency preparedness, told Texas Monthly at the time. “Because that’s where we’re from as well. It’s not only a matter of bringing our stores up as quickly as possible, but the sooner that we can provide relief and the comfort and the items that people need to return themselves to normalcy, the better off the whole community is.”

After the Uvalde tragedy in 2022, when a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School, CEO Charles Butt, the Butt family, and H-E-B collectively donated at least $10 million to build a new school so students and faculty wouldn’t have to return to the traumatic scene.

“Our first store in Uvalde opened in 1959, and Uvalde people are our people,” Butt announced in a rare public statement. “As we continue to mourn tremendous loss, I join with my family and H-E-B in working to ensure the Uvalde community can move forward from this tragic event.