H Mart - Brookline, MA

H Mart
Opened: August 2023

Owner: Il Yeon Kwon

Previous Tenants: Beacon Supermarket (1952 - mid-1990s) >  Johnnie's Fresh Market (closed 2013) > Whole Foods Market (2013-2022)

Cooperative: none

Location: 1028 Beacon St, Brookline, MA

Photographed: August 25, 2025

H Mart is no stranger to small stores. Their original location, in Woodside, Queens, NY, is only around 6500 square feet. But this tiny Brookline storefront, which they opened in the summer of 2023, is even smaller at just 5500 square feet. It was one of the smallest Whole Foods stores, and is now one of the smallest H Mart stores. Take a look around the Whole Foods here!

H Mart has changed the arrangement of the aisles to run side-to-side across the store instead of front to back, as Whole Foods' were. They've also eliminated the rear entrance and exit. You now enter in the front and turn right to go into the produce department, which continues along the right-side wall of the store. Seafood is in the back-right corner with meat on the back wall. Dairy is in an alcove in the back-left corner, previously home to Whole Foods' deli, and frozen is in the front half of the left-side wall.

Notice that H Mart did not change Whole Foods' bright-orange floor!

In fact, you can tell where Whole Foods previously had prep areas -- such as bakery in the front-right corner -- by the difference in flooring. The orange floor was Whole Foods' sales floor, and the darker brown tile was backroom space.

The ceiling is high and makes the small store feel very open despite the fact that H Mart has crammed a lot in here. There are no longer any service departments, which helps streamline it. By my count, H Mart has eight aisles, while Whole Foods had about four or five.

Looking down the right side of the store towards seafood in the back-right corner.

The grocery aisles are narrow, but absolutely packed with selection. H Mart has another small, but slightly larger, store in Somerville to the north along with much larger locations farther outside of the city.

The store was hopping with college students when I visited, as there are a number of colleges within a short distance. That's probably a large part of this store's target market.

No service seafood, but still several cases of fresh and frozen seafood in the back-right corner.

This is also where Whole Foods previously had another entrance and exit towards the rear parking lot, which is now an emergency exit only for H Mart.

Meats are in the last aisle at the back of the store. It looks like the vast majority, if not all, of the fixtures were replaced in the renovation from Whole Foods to H Mart -- which is logical, given that H Mart's layout is very different from Whole Foods'.

Dairy and frozen are in the back-left corner of the store, with an additional half-aisle of frozen foods in an alcove in the back previously occupied by Whole Foods' deli counter.

Again, you can see the border between the previous sales floor and the prep space in the flooring.

And frozen foods continue into the front half of the store as we circle back towards the front wall.

The registers are now lined up on two sides of a walkway on the front wall, a much more efficient use of space than Whole Foods' more traditional supermarket register setup. My guess is that people are also doing smaller orders here, so they don't need the space for a big cart and everything. There are carts here, but they're small.

Don't forget to visit the Whole Foods before it closed here, and tomorrow, we'll see a longtime Brookline grocer that also recently closed. Stay tuned!