Sprouts Farmers Market
Opened: October 3, 2025
Greetings from a brand-new Sprouts! This is currently Sprouts' northernmost location on the east coast, although stores are on the way on Long Island and in Westchester County in New York. This newly-built location in the Avenel section of Woodbridge, NJ anchors a strip mall that's still in progress.
Sprouts definitely chose a tough location here: it's a high-profile location, with easy access from several major roads and highways, but it's also within a couple miles of a couple of ShopRites, a Wegmans, a LIDL, an ALDI, a SuperFresh, a Walmart, a Fresh Grocer, and a number of independent stores. Still, there's some distance to a dedicated natural foods store: the closest stores are two Whole Foods in Clark and Metuchen about five miles away each, but that's a distance in the traffic-crowded area of Central Jersey this store is in.
And the crowds were out in droves for the opening weekend. The store officially opened on Friday, October 3 but I visited the afternoon of Sunday, October 5. It was packed, and checkout lines stretched well into the supermarket.
It's a pretty straightforward Sprouts, if you're familiar with their stores, but given that we're about ten miles away from the only other Sprouts in this region (also on route 35), people here probably don't know the chain.
It's a pretty small store, and it certainly felt smaller because of how many people were there. But meat and seafood are packed into the front-right corner of the store, with service counters about halfway back on the right side along with deli. Packaged prepared foods, baked goods, and cheeses are in the back-right corner. Bulk foods are at the front of the center part of the store, with produce at the back. The grocery aisles run side-to-side on the left side of the store, with dairy along the perimeter and frozen in the middle. Wellness/HABA is in the front-left corner.
The store's interior is simple but attractive, and very open and bright courtesy of the high ceilings.
I wasn't certain whether they bake in-store. As is typical for the chain, there's no service bakery department, but there's some fresh baked goods.
This store felt a bit simpler than other, older Sprouts I've visited, such as this one near Philadelphia. But the chain is rapidly expanding, and it's great to have a reasonable alternative to Whole Foods which seems to be getting worse by the day.
More competition, of course, is a good thing. It keeps everyone on their toes.
Here you can see the grocery aisles on the left side of the store, along with dairy on the perimeter.
This store clearly had very high traffic for the opening weekend, as several things were completely sold out (such as gallons of milk!).
Looking across the back wall...
The freezer aisle is attractively designed to highlight this wall graphic.
And a large selection of natural health and beauty/wellness items are in the front-left corner, one of the key features of this store. It's a very large selection and far larger than any competitors' wellness departments, except certain Whole Foods stores.
And a look across the front-end, with some other grocery items in the small shelves in the middle...
Opened: October 3, 2025
Owner: publicly traded
Previous Tenants: none
Cooperative: none
Location: 1002 St Georges Ave, Avenel, NJ
Photographed: October 5, 2025
That's all for this new Sprouts, but I'm looking forward to seeing more new Sprouts locations in New Jersey. For now, check out the rest of this weekend's posts here...
Saturday
- Trader Joe's opens a new Staten Island store
- Gala Foods builds a store on Long Island
- The Market Report checks in with upcoming America's Food Basket, Food Universe, and SuperFresh stores in Brooklyn
Sunday
Is this (as their site map shows) actually right on the corner of 1/9 & 35, kind of across 35 from the Perkins?
ReplyDeleteWould make sense, I remember seeing construction over there, but if you just search the address it wants to put it up on Route 27, closer to the turn for Inman Ave (where one would find the Fresh Grocer you mentioned).
If it is that spot at 1&9, then ShopRite and Lidl are more like a few hundred feet away (on the other side of 1&9) :)
And yes, the description of distance is quite accurate, even worse when the store (like that Fresh Grocer) is on a street that has a very low speed limit (like 30, may be even less now) when it would be fine with a higher speed. Or where one has to go around several blocks to get to it, as NJ likes to do with ramps and jughandles ;)