Whole Foods Market - Boston, MA (West End)

Whole Foods Market
Opened: September 2005

Owner: Amazon

Previous Tenants: Stop & Shop (opened late 1960s, closed between 2002 and 2005)

Cooperative: none

Location: 181 Cambridge St, Boston, MA

Photographed: July 21, 2019

One thing that's clear about Whole Foods' Boston-area stores is that the chain is okay with somewhat nontraditional locations. Elsewhere, I see mostly straightforward stores, strip mall stores with parking lots in a standard setup, but here in the Boston area they're much more...creative. Their store in the Charles River Plaza in Boston's West End isn't exactly nontraditional (don't worry, we'll see some much stranger Whole Foods in the area) but it's located in the back of this complex that's one part strip mall, one part corporate offices, one part Mass General Hospital space, and one part hotel. From my best estimation, the store is around 30,000 square feet and was originally built in the late 1960s as a Stop & Shop, which later closed between 2002 and 2005. Whole Foods opened here in September of 2005. It looks like it was originally slated to be branded a Bread & Circus, which was a local chain of natural food stores Whole Foods acquired in 1992. They continued to use the Bread & Circus name until 2003, when the remaining stores were rebranded Whole Foods. So this store opened shortly after the switch.

You enter to the produce department on the left side of the store with seafood and butcher on the back wall. Dairy is in the back-right corner, with frozen in an aisle on the right side. The deli/bakery and prepared foods departments are on the right side of the store, along with HABA in a separate room in the front-right corner.

I'm not sure whether the store has been renovated since it opened, since it has the old-school Whole Foods feeling but also doesn't look that old inside.

Service seafood and meat at the back of the produce department and continuing down the back wall...

I like the department signs, but is there a significance to the highlighted letters? I couldn't figure any out, and these are the only two department signs I remember seeing with lettering like this.

I like the rustic-feeling aisle markers here, though! And notice that, although the flooring looks like polished concrete at a glance, because it's an older store it's actually tile.

The freezer cases look fairly new, though.

Dairy in the back-right corner.

I don't have any idea what the Stop & Shop here would've looked like or how it would've been set up, so I don't know if there are any remnants. I assume there aren't, especially since I'm not sure how much of the original building remains. Looking at Historic Aerials, it looks like most of the Stop & Shop building was either demolished or significantly remodeled. The only picture I can find of the Stop & Shop is from Getty Images, shortly before the store closed.

The cheese, deli/prepared foods, and bakery departments are on the right side of the store lining the right side wall and front wall.

In the typical setup, self-serve food bars fill the middle of that area.

And the coffee & tea department is the last one between the prepared foods department and the front-end.

On the far left side is a separate room for health and beauty items, which extends farther forward than the rest of the supermarket as I remember.

So if I'm not mistaken -- and it's been a couple years -- this room is in front of the deli/prepared foods area, possibly previously a neighboring storefront in the strip mall.

And that's all for the Charles River Plaza Whole Foods! Other than Whole Foods, this general neighborhood has only one other conventional supermarket, which opened about six years ago at North Station. That's Monday's store tour!