Whole Foods Market
Open: 2013-2022
I visited the Whole Foods back in the summer of 2019. It was a delightful little neighborhood supermarket, and very complete for its small size. (I assume there's a basement here, which would bring the overall size slightly higher.) The store closed along with five other Whole Foods locations in the spring of 2022. It didn't stay vacant for long: after Whole Foods closed in May, H Mart opened up in August 2023, reflecting the area's growing Asian community. I recently returned to the area and photographed the H Mart, which you can tour here!
There are a handful of other H Mart locations in the Boston area, but none within Boston itself. We most recently saw one in Quincy to the south. That store opened right around the same time as this one.
Produce and bakery were at the front of the tiny Whole Foods, with grocery aisles and the other service departments behind that. Cheese and meat/seafood were on the right side of the store, with dairy on the back wall, frozen in one of the grocery aisles (I think there were 5 in total), and deli/prepared foods on the left side. Registers were at the front but there was also an entrance/exit door to the back, where there's a tiny parking lot.
H Mart removed the bakery area to expand the produce department. They also condensed the registers into one line, which they have in certain other urban locations, from Whole Foods' more traditional supermarket-style registers. Unlike in Quincy, they did replace the decor here.
As you can see, this was a very nice Whole Foods even though it was small, and it certainly seemed busy the few times I was here in the summer of 2019. But my guess is that the lease term was probably up, and/or they just didn't want to deal with a location that was so different from their typical operating model. That said, if they'd just waited a few years, they could have put the space to use as a Daily Shop. Even so, the Lenox Hill location is several thousand square feet larger than this one.
One particularly nice feature of the store's design is the exposed wooden ceiling, which H Mart has kept. H Mart's remodel -- which didn't take more than a couple months -- wasn't that extensive.
Dairy on the back wall. This is now H Mart's meat department.
Thanks to one old picture on Yelp, we can actually get a look inside Johnnie's. It looks like the general setup was basically the same as Whole Foods', but the decor was very different.
Deli and prepared foods in the last aisle on the left side of the store...
Owner: Amazon
Previous Tenants: Beacon Supermarket (1952 - mid-1990s) > Johnnie's Fresh Market (closed 2013)
Later Tenants: H Mart (August 2023- )
Cooperative: none
Location: 1028 Beacon St, Brookline, MA
Photographed: June 2, 2019
When local chain Johnnie's Foodmaster went out of business in 2012, Whole Foods acquired six of their ten stores. One, we saw not too long ago over in Charlestown, but the rest are in Boston suburbs I either haven't photographed or haven't posted yet. Here in Brookline, a longtime supermarket remains a grocer today even though it's changed ownership a few times. The earliest grocer I can locate at this spot was the Beacon Supermarket, which opened in 1952 and was in business at least through the mid-1990s. At some point thereafter, it became a Johnnie's Fresh Market (presumably a reference to the smaller size of this store, compared to the larger Foodmaster locations). It held that brand until 2013, when Johnnie's closed, and Whole Foods opened later that year. At just 5500 square feet, this must have been one of the smallest Whole Foods stores (excluding their newer, small-format Daily Shop locations).
And that wraps up our look at the Brookline Whole Foods! Don't miss the H Mart here. Brookline has changed a bit since I was last here in 2019, with some changes like this store's transition, and tomorrow we'll check out a grocer that was in Brookline for decades but recently closed.
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