West Newbury Food Mart - West Newbury, MA

West Newbury Food Mart
Opened: 1963; 1959 previously on this property

Owner: Vermette family

Previous Tenants: none

Cooperative: Associated Grocers of New England

Location: 275 Main St, West Newbury, MA

Photographed: August 20, 2025

"Welcome," that chicken painted on the store above says, "to The Market Report's last store visit in Massachusetts!" Over the last year and a half or so, we've spent a lot of time visiting stores across the state, and now it's time for the very last one. And it's a fun one!

The West Newbury Food Mart has been in business here since 1959, according to their website. It opened in 1959, but burned down just four years later. That resulted in the current iteration of the store being built, although it was expanded and renovated in 1976 to its current 7600 square feet or so. It's the only full-scale grocer in West Newbury, but we're just down the street from the Shaw's and the Market Basket in Newburyport here.

The exterior has recently gotten a paint job, including these new murals of some very large farm animals. It certainly draws your attention to the otherwise fairly bland building. This store shares ownership with the nearby Vermette's Market in Amesbury, another old-school supermarket about five and a half miles north.

The store faces the parking lot on the side, not out to the street. You enter on the right side to the produce department on the front wall, with customer service and bakery together in the front-right corner. Meat and deli line the right-side wall, with a service butcher and deli in the back-right corner. Dairy is on the back wall then, with frozen in the last aisle on the left side. There's also a liquor store in the front-left corner.

The produce refrigerator to the right above is along the front wall of the store. Below, we're looking across the front wall over towards the registers and the liquor store.

The interior is old-school but not neglected, and it feels like a very pleasant small-town store. There's a selection of the basics along with some more unusual local products.

This counter in the front functions as both customer service and lottery, as well as the service bakery counter. (It looks like the trays in the service counter are stocked with baked goods earlier in the day.)

There's also a selection of breads and pastries made by a local bakery here in West Newbury.

It's definitely an old store, and you can see some places where maintenance is slipping like the many burnt-out lights here. But still, it's a great little store.

These aisle markers must have been installed on day one in 1976! It's rare to find artifacts like these in supermarkets.

A look across the back wall.

There's a variety of fixtures of different ages here, but it looks like many may have been replaced since the 1976 opening of the new store.

I love that the category panels inside the aisle marker are also shaped the same as the frame!

This store is a member of Associated Grocers of New England, and has the Topco brands on the shelves -- Food Club, Full Circle for natural/organic, Simply Done for nonfoods, and a few others.

West Newbury is about halfway between Haverhill and Newburyport. Haverhill has three Market Baskets, including one about three miles southwest of here.

Frozen foods and the beginning of the liquor department are in the last aisle.

It looks like the liquor store is a big part of this grocer's business, as is often the case with these small-town supermarkets.

The rest of the liquor store is actually a bit separated from the sales floor of the supermarket, with a few short aisles of beer and wine beyond this partial wall. The registers are behind me in the picture below.

And speaking of the registers, they're two very old-school turquoise and chrome registers, also probably from the 1970s. I love them!

And that is it for Massachusetts! Thanks for touring the state with me. But wait, we're not done with this area just yet. We're going to cross the border into New Hampshire tomorrow for a look at the short coastline of New Hampshire!