Whole Foods Market - Jamaica Plain, MA

Whole Foods Market

Opened: 2011

Owner: Amazon

Previous Tenants: Hi-Lo Foods (1964-2011)

Cooperative: none

Location: 413 Centre St, Jamaica Plain, MA

Photographed: June 29, 2019

I mentioned in the "coming soon" section that Jamaica Plain has gentrified very significantly over the last several years, and this Whole Foods is the perfect example. As an independent called Hi-Lo Foods, the supermarket became a center of the Cuban community that lives (or, increasingly lived) in the Hyde Square area. And naturally, its closure and replacement by Whole Foods sparked significant controversy. As for the wonderful midcentury modern exterior of the store, it's apparently original to Hi-Lo.

Whole Foods has added several large murals to the building on all sides. It's a largely residential area, and this supermarket is set slightly away from the business district.

You enter on the left side of the store to the produce department. Meat and seafood are in the back-left corner, with dairy on the back wall and frozen on the right side. Deli/bakery and prepared foods are on the right side of the store in the last aisle.

The Whole Foods is a nice store, but it's sad to see such a long-term independent grocer being replaced by a Whole Foods.

Incidentally, does anyone else have a vague memory of seeing videos on VHS or something in your middle or high school Spanish class of people grocery shopping in this Hi-Lo and talking in Spanish? Was that a real thing or something my imagination invented? (I can picture the orange and purple cover of the textbook, which I think they also used for the graphics for the video.)

At just 14,000 square feet, this is much smaller than most Whole Foods, and you can feel that it's a small store.

Here's a look across the back wall, and you can see just how abbreviated it is.

Still, the grocery aisles feel similar to most Whole Foods, though again it's a little cramped.

It looks like, as usual, Whole Foods replaced all the fixtures here. I don't see anything that looks like it would have been left over from Hi-Lo.

Frozen foods in the second-to-last aisle, with deli/bakery in the last aisle.

I like this decor, and I like the warmer earth tones throughout the store. Still, it felt just like any other Whole Foods, and there didn't even seem to be an attempt to, for instance, have a larger-than-usual selection of Latin American foods. Given the controversy surrounding this store's opening, I would've expected something like that.

That's all for this Whole Foods, which is one of two larger supermarkets in the northern part of Jamaica Plain. Tomorrow we'll check out a small former grocer just a block over, and then on Monday we're off to the other large supermarket in the neighborhood!