The Market Report

Foodtown of Atlantic Highlands Owner: Lou Scaduto Jr. / Circus Fresh Foods Opened:  1977 Previous Tenants:  Safeway (early 1960s-late 1960s) > Finast (late 1960s-1977) Cooperative:  Allegiance Retail Services Location:  3 Bayshore Plaza, Atlantic Highlands, NJ Photographed:  December 2020 We are here in Atlantic Highlands for our second clearly high-volume Jersey Shore Circus Foodtown! Make sure to check out Port Monmouth, our first store, here first. Acme Style covered this store on the possibility it's a former ACME, but it's not -- instead, it's a former Safeway similar to the one we saw on Staten Island a while back. At 33,000 square feet, it's slightly smaller than Port Monmouth but still a substantial supermarket in a ShopRite-free area -- and that's also a large reason why it's succeeded as well as it has. The grand aisle here takes up about 2/3 of the pitched-roof space, with the grocery aisles mostly in the expansion to the right. The layout of th

Foodtown of Port Monmouth Owner: Lou Scaduto Jr. / Circus Fresh Foods Opened:  1998 Previous Tenants:  A&P (1960s-1998) Cooperative:  Allegiance Retail Services Location:  426 NJ-36, Port Monmouth, NJ Photographed:  December 2020 It's time for our first official Shore store! As I've said, and as we can see in the map above, sadly we will not be going too far down the shore -- no farther than Brick -- but we're starting here at the northeastern part of Monmouth County for two Foodtowns today. This first location, Port Monmouth, is the farther west, with Atlantic Highlands just to the east. The sun was not being too kind to me to photograph the exterior of this expanded A&P centennial... A 1960s-era, 19,000 square foot barrel roof store has been more than doubled in size, likely by A&P, for the existing Foodtown which opened in 1998. It moved up route 36 from an older store in a former ACME just to the west. Now it's time to play a game of "how much of

It's time for our next (northern) Jersey Shore group! Unfortunately this is as far south as we'll be getting on the east coast of New Jersey, though we'll go a bit farther south when we get out to the western part of the state. We're going to pass along the coast through Port Monmouth, Atlantic Highlands, Sea Bright, Long Branch, West Long Branch, Belmar, and Brick with a relatively small group of just over a week's worth of stores. However, we'll double up on a few days so we see more than one store a day. As we can see in the map above, we're actually heading back up to north of the Holmdel area, then continuing all along the shore to Brick, which is about 20 miles south of Tinton Falls where we ended the last group. All of our coverage is going to be in Monmouth County, except for Brick Township which is in Ocean County. But for now, we'll be going back to the very northeastern part of Monmouth County tomorrow, for not one but two  Foodtowns tomorro

ACME Markets Opened: 1999 replacing 1950s-era store next door, which was demolished Previous Tenants:  none Location:  616 Newman Springs Rd, Lincroft, NJ Photographed:  December 2020 The Market Report comes to beautiful Lincroft! Beautiful, of course, being the adjective to describe the ACME and not the town, though the town is quite nice too. Acme Style has covered this store many times  but I figured I needed to get out here for myself. I'm glad I did, as it's one of the most beautiful ACMEs in the northern/central NJ area. The 41,000 square foot store was built in 1999 and underwent an extensive renovation in late 2016, holding a grand reopening in February 2017. I visited the store almost four years later (holy moly, time flies) at the very end of 2020 to find it looking just as good as (re-) opening day. We enter to a beautiful grand aisle on the right side, with produce and meat/seafood lining the outside of the aisle, and bakery-deli in an island facing. Quality Built