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Special Report: The Market of Bloomingdale & Waldwick

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The Market of Bloomingdale
Opened: August 2026
Owner: Adam & Erica Shapiro
Previous Tenants: Big Leader Supermarket (1950s) > ShopRite (1960s) > Pathmark (1968-1970s) > Food World (closed 2023) > Bloomingdale Supermarket (2024-2025) > SuperFresh (2025-2026)
Cooperative: Associated Supermarket Group
Location: 78 Main St, Bloomingdale, NJ
Photographed: September 16, 2026
Ah, the tiny town of Bloomingdale. It has one very small supermarket right on Main Street, and it's been remarkably active in the last few years. Let's take a look at the latest happenings. So this space was a store called Big Leader back in the 1950s, becoming a ShopRite the following decade and then a Pathmark in 1968. In the 1970s, Pathmark moved out to Kinnelon, and at some point after that, this space became an independent called Food World. Food World finally closed in 2023, and the following year, Adam and Erica Shapiro's Shap Markets took over the space. It reopened as Bloomingdale Supermarket by Foodtown in January 2024 after some renovation. In late 2025, Shap Markets broke away from Allegiance/Foodtown, and joined Key Food, rebranding this store SuperFresh. Just months later, they've now also split from Key Food, and are now affiliated with the Associated Supermarket Group. It's now The Market of Bloomingdale.
That follows the opening of The Market of Point Pleasant Beach. As I mentioned on this post, the formerly branded stores (SuperFresh here in Bloomingdale; The Food Emporium in Maplewood and Waldwick) have dropped their brands and are now just the generic The Market. Inside, the Bloomingdale location has been reset again with ASG's price tags and Avenue A storebrand products, but not much else has really changed.
As you can see in these pictures, this store is absolutely spotless. That appears to be because nobody shops here. Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but it was very clear the produce had been sitting for quite a while, and you can see the meat department was rather empty. Though the grocery aisles are beautifully faced (kudos to the employees running this store), they're mostly not stocked more than one or two items deep. Unfortunately, that now seems to be the standard for all the Shap Markets stores -- we'll see Waldwick in a minute, and the last time I was in Maplewood it was also very lightly stocked. It seems like these stores don't perform particularly well, and so there's no need to keep more than the bare minimum on the shelves.
If that's true, I do wonder why the group continues to open new stores. If Waldwick, which opened in January, was already struggling (in fact it looks like that store never really captured enough business to thrive), why open another one in Point Pleasant Beach? For that matter, if this one wasn't doing enough volume, why open Waldwick? It looks like what's happening here is that the stores are just barely getting by with very low volume but also very low costs to run them.
A close look at the shelves will show just exactly what I mean here. You can see these spices on the shelves, stocked just one row deep, with the Bloomingdale Supermarket logo -- plus a couple from Marrazzo's, which Shap Markets also owns now. This looks more like a space filler than a real grocery aisle to me.
Still, the staff here are clearly doing what they can to keep this store in good shape -- very clean and stocked as well as possible with the merchandise that's already here. Now for a stop over in Waldwick, which has been redone just a little bit to reflect the much lower-than-expected sales volume.


The Market of Waldwick
Opened: August 2026
Owner: Adam & Erica Shapiro
Previous Tenants: Grand Union > Stop & Shop (2001-2017) > Giant Farmers Market (2018-2024) > The Food Emporium (Jan-Aug 2026)
Cooperative: Associated Supermarket Group
Location: 19 Wyckoff Ave, Waldwick, NJ
Photographed: September 16, 2026
I do like the new The Market signage here, and I think it's really sharp-looking. It's also smart to not tie the store to a specific brand so that, if Shap Markets changes its affiliation yet again, they won't have to rebrand. As an aside, it's sometimes a sign of trouble that runs deeper if an operator very quickly switches through multiple banners and/or suppliers. Not always, but often.
This store was previously a Food Emporium, which opened at the beginning of this year (a crazy thought, because as we'll see in these pictures, it already looks like it's nearing the end of its life). The grand aisle on the left side has been redone to greatly reduce the selection of fresh food, and that combined with the fact that here too, the produce seemed to have been sitting for a while, I suspect this store is doing much lower volume than it was originally expected to.
So what used to be the produce department right as you enter is now a row of refrigerated packaged deli items and a few more grocery aisles. The produce has been moved over to the left side wall of the store, where prepared foods used to be (there's now a much smaller selection). The bakery department has been dramatically reduced, too, and it looked like now they're only baking a handful of items in-store.
The above pictures were from The Food Emporium's opening day.
Refrigerated packaged baked goods and juices are now in this section up front, and refrigerated produce is on the left side where grab-and-go prepared foods used to be.
As you can see, this is a greatly reduced produce department. It's natural to cut back features and offerings that don't sell after the grand opening, and that in and of itself isn't a sign that the store is struggling. But cuts this drastic rarely happen without the store falling far short of where it was expected to be.
Packaged prepared foods and deli items used to line the left side wall of the store, with cold cuts in the back-left corner. The expansive cheese department was behind that.
Now, the cheese department has been cut back a lot too, with regular sliced and shredded cheeses having been moved out of the dairy department to fill most of this case. Gourmet cheeses, of the type that used to be here, have been reduced to just a small section of the case. Interesting that this new layout is very similar to what Giant Farmers Market had here before they closed.
This store still seems to be rather well-stocked, and it's preparing for a grand reopening as The Market of Waldwick on Friday. I don't know what's left to do before the reopening, but I do have my doubts about the long-term viability of this store. On the other hand, maybe these adjustments are exactly what needed to happen to allow it to stay in business without all of the expensive perishables that weren't selling before.
It's unclear why Shap Markets has changed suppliers this many times, too. Again, that can sometimes (not always) be a sign of an operator struggling to find their footing. But given that their first location only opened in 2021, that's a lot of changing in a short time, and far more than most operators do. It just makes me wonder what the financial picture of the whole organization is, and whether the growth over the last five years has been successful.
This store does still feel completely viable, though, and it's not in bad shape. Hopefully these adjustments will get it where it needs to be. It's also now under the purview of the Associated Supermarket Group, which has been expanding with some great stores lately (and has improved their execution overall very dramatically over the last several years). It's possible a little help from ASG can get these stores where they need to be.
We'll have to wait and see what the longer-term plans are. In the meantime, here's a look at this weekend's other posts!

Saturday
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