Whole Foods Market - Boston, MA (Back Bay)

Whole Foods Market
Opened: 2003

Owner: Amazon

Previous Tenants: Stop & Shop (opened early 1970s) > Bread & Circus (1995-2003)

Cooperative: none

Location: 1065 Westland Ave, Boston, MA

Photographed: July 20, 2019

Supermarkets come in all shapes and sizes. Some are just a little more... unusual. And today we're going to see a round one! Well, to be accurate, it's actually a half-circle one. The roughly 20,000 square foot store opened in the early 1970s as a Stop & Shop, closing at some point before 1995. In 1995, gourmet food store chain Bread & Circus opened up shop, which had actually been owned by Whole Foods for three years at that time following Whole Foods' purchase of the Boston-area chain in 1992. In 2003, the Bread & Circus stores were rebranded Whole Foods.

The Whole Foods we saw at the Charles River Plaza about two weeks ago was also a Stop & Shop that was slated to become a Bread & Circus, but it opened after Whole Foods decided to drop the Bread & Circus branding.

In some unusually-shaped stores, such as the Ayer Shop 'n Save, the building's shape doesn't really dictate the interior layout. But here, the interior is rounded too, with the aisles being slightly curved to line the curved outside wall.

You enter in the middle of the half-circle, where there's also a coffee shop (you can see it in the first interior picture). The produce department lines the right side of the half-circle, with the front-end on the left. Seafood, cheese, and bakery are on the right side of the back wall, with meat and deli/prepared foods on the left side, along with frozen and dairy.

You might notice the Symphony sign, and this store's location is referred to as Symphony. It's just a block west of the Boston Symphony Hall, where the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops perform.

The curved aisles are definitely unusual! I assume Whole Foods' setup is essentially the same as Bread & Circus', but I have no idea what Stop & Shop's layout was here.

Despite the small size and unusual layout, this store has full service departments.

Cheese and bakery are up next in the back of the store.

I like the red ceiling here, although I wish the ceiling in the rest of the store were darker. Notice the curved lighting and aisles you can see across the store below.

Meat and prepared foods/deli are on the left side of the store on the perimeter. As you can probably tell, the store is very cramped.

Dairy and frozen in the back-left corner. I like the decor here, too.

And a look at the front-end, which is of course also curved. This layout results in the unusual setup of a grocery aisle running right along the front-end rather than each aisle ending at the front-end.

And that's all for Back Bay. Next we're moving just west for the Fenway/Kenmore/Longwood area, for a soon-to-be-replaced supermarket just blocks from Fenway Park!