Special Report: ShopRite - East Orange, NJ

ShopRite of East Orange

Opened: May 27, 2026

Owner: Sumas family/Village Super Market

Previous Tenants: none

Cooperative: Wakefern Food Corp.

Location: 533 Main St, East Orange, NJ

Photographed: May 27, 2026

It's not all that often that I get to post about a brand-new ShopRite, so today is an exciting day. It's especially exciting because Village Super Market has replaced the tired old store at Brick Church Plaza with a truly impressive new-build one on the same property. This is the latest development in a multi-year project to reuse a large lot right at the Brick Church train station in downtown East Orange. Since the late 1980s, it's held a fairly unremarkable strip mall anchored by a ShopRite. Now, a new development has brought a higher-rise building complete with a new supermarket on the ground floor.

You can see the store in progress in 2024 here, and tour the previous ShopRite here. Although the new supermarket has been in the planning and construction phases for years -- the initial plans date back to 2019, and construction started about three years ago -- the old store remained operational until the night of Tuesday, May 26. On the morning of the next day, the new ShopRite opened to significant crowds. I visited in the morning and the store was already packed. Eventually, the old supermarket will be demolished to make way for ground-level parking for the new store, but for now, customers park in the first two levels of a garage on site and walk down this clear walkway to the new store's entrance.

The old store remains intact -- for now. Workers were inside clearing it out.

For an idea of the previous and new setups, check out some Google street views.

Now, let's step into the new ShopRite. While the old one was somewhat dingy and dated, the new one is absolutely state-of-the-art. It's well-designed and stocks a unique product mix clearly tailored to what the area is looking for. A note given the sign below with the store hours visible: the old store was open 24 hours, but the new one is open 6am-midnight. There's 24-hour signage up around the back of the building, and it seems like the plan is after the intial opening phase is done, this one will extend the hours back to 24 hours again.

You enter on either side of the foyer (the brick area), but the entrance is on the left side once you get in. The grand aisle features floral and bakery at the front, with bakery in an island at the front of the first few grocery aisles. Produce takes up the middle of the grand aisle, with prepared foods, sushi, and seafood towards the back and deli on the back wall. Meat lines the rest of the back wall, with dairy and frozen on the right side of the store. Pharmacy is in the front-right corner.

The new store looks similar to (albeit much more modern than) the freshly-remodeled ShopRite of Livingston a couple towns west. Here, you can tell the whole building is brand-new.

And no expense was spared on building out the new supermarket, clearly, with elaborate lit-up decor and a really attractive interior.

Bakery being here in an island is an unusual setup, and not one I see often in Village stores. Bakery prep is elsewhere, but I'm not sure exactly where.

A small self-service coffee bar along with pastries and muffins are on the front wall next to customer service.

It's clear that Village has made an attempt to cater to the residents of East Orange, including large Caribbean and African communities. Village seems to be sharpening its focus on tailoring stores to the neighborhood -- while the new(ly redone) Livingston ShopRite has a kosher bakery and an expanded kosher deli, this store has a wider variety of tropical produce, a fish fry counter, a halal meat department, and international selections smoothly integrated in each department. It's some of the best store-specific merchandising and design I've seen from major operators lately.

Still, it makes sense Village would be able to get the offerings right here. They've had a store in East Orange for decades -- since the 1950s, in fact, though their early stores were more small grocers than full supermarkets -- and their original store in South Orange is just two and a half miles away. It's recently reopened as Village Marketplace, no relation. Livingston is about five miles west, and Village also has a location in between in West Orange.

Although the initial plans called for the new supermarket to be smaller than the ShopRite it was replacing, that changed before construction and now this ShopRite is around 65,000 square feet, or about 10,000 square feet larger than the old one. Most of that extra space seems to have been used for the grand aisle, which is now complete with a large prepared foods department including a sushi bar and a number of grab-and-go options, none of which the old store had.

One of the most notable is the Fish Fry station, shown below, something unique to this store (but a common feature in urban fish markets catering to Caribbean communities). It includes premade sandwiches and a self-serve hot bar. The seafood department also has an expanded selection of whole fish, again taking a page from the playbook of the local fish markets.

In a somewhat surprising twist, seafood is actually the only full-service department here. Sure, others have clerks behind the counter, but they're designed for self-service with employees available for special orders. You can see below that the deli is entirely self-service, though you can also put in special orders on a kiosk. That's the same shift made in Livingston, though Livingston also has a service kosher counter and a service butcher, which this store does not.

Looking back up towards the front of the grand aisle...

Meats line the back wall, with dairy in the back corner and continuing down the last aisle. You can see here the new store is bright and spacious, a serious contrast to the dim old one with its low ceilings.

No Fairway-inspired cheese coutner here, but there's still a specialty cheese case (which the old store didn't have).

The grocery aisles are clearly ready for traffic -- they were immaculately stocked for grand opening morning. The selection here is slightly different from other nearby Village stores, again tailored to what people are actually looking for around here.

There's a dedicated international aisle, labeled Global Flavors, but this store also incorporates international foods into various other departments. There's a specific spot for chorizo in the deli, for instance, and Global Flavors-branded sections in the frozen and dairy departments. Livingston doesn't have a Global Flavors aisle as far as I can remember.

You can tell this is a new-build store by how smooth and shiny that concrete floor is!

Multiple East Orange-specific signs throughout the store, which Livingston also has variations on.

This store has a noticeably smaller health and beauty section than many Village ShopRites, though their newer stores do seem to be cutting back on that. Most medicines, for instance, are in locked cases up here by the pharmacy and not in the aisle. That's also definitely to cut down on theft. I don't know what that looks like at a store like this today, but East Orange has a reputation as a high-crime area. Though Livingston is only a couple miles away from East Orange, its median household income is almost four times that of East Orange. Median household income isn't always a good indicator of crime rates, but suffice it to say that these are very different areas.

A look across the front-end, with self checkouts in a cluster on the far side back near customer service and produce. Although Village has added plenty of self-checkouts to their stores, they're also clearly still committed to full-service checkout in this and other locations.

And looking in the other direction, from the bakery/produce side...

Not only is this one of the best ShopRites I've seen lately, it's one of the best new supermarkets I've visited in the last couple years. It's well thought out in a way that really addresses what people in the area are looking for, it's attractively designed, and all indications suggest it's being received very well. Glad to see that here, a redevelopment of an old strip mall didn't involve the area losing its supermarket! Here's a look at this weekend's other posts...

Saturday

• Unusual grocers announce themselves in Albany and Staten Island
• A large Indian supermarket opens in central Jersey
• A Brooklyn grocer completes a renovation just a few years after opening
• Returning to a Philly ACME under renovation

Sunday

• ShopRite and Food Bazaar open stunning new locations
• Plus, we check in on another ShopRite's remodel
• Key Food opens in Matawan while converting two stores in Queens