The Market Report

Price Chopper Opened: 2012 Owner:  Northeast Grocery Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  167 W Main St, Hopkinton, MA Photographed:  August 24, 2025 Welcome to Hopkinton! This town of just under 20,000 is home to a relatively new Price Chopper, which is the only supermarket in town. It's a 40,000 square foot store that was built in 2012, and it still feels pretty new inside. Hopkinton did also previously have an independent supermarket in town, Colella's , which stood on Main Street for 70 years. You can see more about the store on this Facebook page . A Starbucks and a cafe are in the front-left corner. The grand aisle is on the left side of the store, with deli and prepared foods lining the left side wall and bakery in the back corner. Meat and seafood are on the rest of the back wall, with dairy and frozen on the right side. No pharmacy here, but floral is in the front-right corner. It looked like the prepared foods departments were up and ...

Before we continue north along the coast of New England, it's time for a quick return to Worcester County. Why? Well, after I posted stores in the area of eastern Worcester County (see this area ), I actually got the chance to go back to the Hopkinton and Milford areas very recently -- in late August of this year, which obviously is much more recently than most of my Worcester-area coverage from ca. 2018-2023. So now we're going to interrupt the usual flow to return to this region, then a quick swing back up towards Lowell before we return to the north shore, to the north of Boston. We'll be taking a look at a store in Hopkinton, about 15 miles southeast of Worcester and ten miles southwest of Framingham. Then The Market Report visits all of the grocers of Milford, a midsize city between Worcester and Providence. This area is actually a hotspot for grocery activity, as we'll see a couple new stores or recently-changed stores in one way or another. Come back tomorrow for...

Market 32 Opened: 2021 Owner:  Northeast Grocery Previous Tenants:  Price Chopper (late 1990s-2021) Cooperative:  none Location:  240 E Main St, Marlborough, MA Photographed:  March 26, 2025 It's time for a look at a Market 32! It's been a while since we've seen a store owned by Northeast Grocery, which runs Price Chopper, Market 32, Market Bistro, and Tops stores. This one was built in the 1990s as a Price Chopper, converting to Market 32 in 2021 after some renovation. It's a nice store, but definitely a far cry from the deluxe Market 32 stores . A programming note: this store is actually back in Middlesex County, about eight miles northwest of Framingham  (where today's other post is ). But I inconveniently visited this store less than a week after I finished posting the Framingham-area stores. We also recently saw the Hannaford here in Marlborough , the only other supermarket in town, which is slated to become a Shaw's and closed in September. So now we...

Big Boi Meat Market Opened: summer 2022 Owner:  Maycan Groner Alvarenga Previous Tenants:  Tedeschi Food Shops Cooperative:  none Location:  430 Waverly St, Framingham, MA Photographed:  August 27, 2025 We return to Framingham very briefly to see the city's Big Boi Meat Market, opened in the summer of 2022 in a former Tedeschi convenience store -- I'm not sure what was here before them -- joining locations in Worcester and Shrewsbury , among a few others. Today's other post is a look at a Market 32 a bit outside of Framingham, so check that out here , and tomorrow we're headed south over towards Milford!

Trader Joe's Opened: ca. 2000 Owner:  Aldi Nord Previous Tenants:  unknown Cooperative:  none Location:  145 Great Rd, Acton, MA Photographed:  May 20, 2025 Welcome back to Acton! On our first pass through town, we saw almost every supermarket in town. Check out the old and new Stop & Shop , the Roche Brothers , Idylwilde Farms , Mei Ya , and Donelan's . But we missed one store: this Trader Joe's, which takes up about 13,000 square feet on the southeastern side of town. Inside, it's a pretty standard Trader Joe's. Produce is on the left side, with dairy and cheese on the back wall. Frozen foods are in the middle, with meat and nonfoods in the last aisle. The grocery aisles run diagonally across the middle of the store, with frozen foods in the middle. This was one of the relatively early Trader Joe's in the Boston area, opening around 2000. The first stores in the Boston area opened in Cambridge and Brookline in 1996. Upright and single-tier frozen foods...