Today's store tour is located here in Soundview, in the southeastern Bronx. It's a peninsula formed by the Bronx River to the west and the Westchester Creek to the east, making it a little isolated from the rest of the borough. The Bruckner Expressway slices right through the middle of the neighborhood, with many businesses along Bruckner Boulevard, which is basically the highway's service road. Now, there are lots of supermarkets in this neighborhood, but as you'll see, they tend to be clustered along a few corridors.
We're looking at the Food Bazaar today, but tomorrow we'll be seeing the ShopRite. Unfortunately that's all the time we're going to be spending in Soundview this time around.
You may recall we've actually
seen this store before. Kind of. I'm glad to be back, because it's a very nice place! The store opened in 2006 in a former Waldbaum's, which had been extensively renovated. Additional renovations took place in 2012 and then again in 2017-18 in anticipation of the ShopRite's opening in a former Key Food.
We enter to see the same variant of the decor package as we did in
North Bergen, albeit scaled down slightly to this store's lower ceiling and smaller footprint of 40,000 square feet. You enter to produce, with deli and seafood on the right side wall. Meat is in an island that backs up to the grocery aisles, with dairy and beer on the back wall and frozen foods at the far end of the store. In the image above, we're actually looking towards the side wall of the store with the front wall being to the right. Where the lower ceiling begins was a recent expansion, and I'm not entirely sure what the store's layout would have been before that since deli and seafood are both located in the expansion.
This store definitely builds on the bazaar feeling that Food Bazaar incorporates into most of its stores. There's a large selection of Caribbean and tropical produce, as is to be expected, but there's also lots of organic and specialty choices.
Looking from produce along the front end.
Deli/bakery/hot food is in the front corner of the store. This Food Bazaar doesn't bake in-store. They do have a small hot food counter, which was not yet open at the time of the morning I visited.
Vegan products, specialty snacks, kombucha, and cold brew coffee. I don't know whether Soundview is gentrifying, but this isn't exactly the selection I'd expect to find in this particular supermarket.
Large self-serve seafood department in the back corner of the store. Looks like we're fresh out of snapper. Too bad.
Meat takes up the back part of the produce department, which extends beyond the case to the left here.
The service meat counter is actually an island, and the grocery aisles run behind this counter. That layout is a little awkward, but judging by the tile around the meat department, I'm assuming it's been that way for quite a while. Everything else is new; it appears that all the fixtures in the store (except grocery shelving, which had been redone in 2012) were replaced during the remodel.
One thing that was not replaced is this random Bogopa sign over the walkway to the grocery aisles. Bogopa is the corporate name of Food Bazaar Supermarkets, but I don't have an explanation for why it's placed here on this wall.
Food Bazaar's famous wall of values in the first aisle.
The grocery shelving, having only been installed in 2012, was not replaced during the latest renovation.
Dairy and beer run along the back wall.
Like North Bergen, there's a double back aisle, so there's a row of cases along the back wall and then another row in front of it forming two aisles.
Okay, it looks like these dairy cases were not replaced during the renovation. The curved overhang on the left is vaguely reminiscent of what ACME was putting in its PF&H 1.0 renovations, too.
Really going all-out here in the frozen aisle with wooden structures and hanging lit snowflakes. For anyone who's in the area, this store does also have a public restroom -- something that was quite necessary at the time of my visit.
A look along the front-end. Looks very much like many other Food Bazaar front ends. And don't be deceived, this store is rarely this empty. I was here pretty early, so no one was doing their shopping. That about wraps up our tour here at Food Bazaar on Bruckner Blvd, and come back tomorrow for the ShopRite just down the street!
Food Bazaar Supermarket
1630 Bruckner Blvd, Bronx, NY
Open Daily 7am-10:30pm
foodbazaar.com
(718) 860-1408
Photographed July 2018
What Co-Op does Food Bazaar belong to?
ReplyDeleteActually, they're completely independent. Their wholesaler is Bozzutto's of Cheshire, CT, which provides Hy-Top and Seven Farms storebrand products, but Food Bazaar has introduced and expanded its own line of Bogopa brand products which are packaged specifically for Food Bazaar.
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