Waterbury Village Market - Waterbury, VT

Waterbury Village Market

Opened: ca. 1990

Owner: Associated Grocers Northeast

Previous Tenants: unknown

Cooperative: Associated Grocers Northeast

Location: 80 S Main St, Waterbury, VT

Photographed: August 10, 2025

In this somewhat remote part of northern Vermont, most small-town supermarkets (and general stores and convenience stores and food stores in general) are supplied by Associated Grocers Northeast, formerly Associated Grocers of New England. But AGNE also owns some stores in Vermont and New Hampshire, including this one and this one that we've already toured. Here's another store owned by AGNE, the Waterbury Village Market in the small town of Waterbury. To situate yourself, we're about 10 miles northwest of Montpelier and 25 miles southeast of Burlington.

Looking at this exterior, it really looks like this store is a modified A&P centennial, right? Wrong. This 22,000 square foot building was actually built between 1986 and 1996, or a couple decades after A&P stopped building centennial stores. It does look like this supermarket replaced an older and smaller building on the same property that was slightly closer to the street, but I don't know if that was a previous supermarket here.

It's much clearer when you get inside that this isn't a renovated store from the 1950s or 60s, but instead a much newer one. Produce is in the front-left corner, with cheese, wine, and beer in the rest of the first aisle. Meat lines the back wall, with frozen and dairy on the right side and deli/bakery in the front-right corner.

One thing that intrigues me is that the AGNE-owned stores don't seem to have any standard decor inside, and each one looks different. That might be a result of the fact that the decor was installed by the previous owners, but in this case, I don't know if AGNE built the store themselves or acquired it after some other operator built it. We'll shortly see a store AGNE built itself.

You can see here that this store is impeccable, and it looks like some of the fixtures were probably updated after the original construction. It's in extremely good shape.

Like all AGNE stores, this one carries Food Club items from Topco.

Some of these AGNE stores also feel somewhat more like the food co-ops we've seen in this area, with higher-end features like better breads and baked goods, lots of local produce, and bulk departments (which you can see in the last aisle above).

Again, lots of local breads here, like we saw in Montpelier.

This is not the only supermarket in Waterbury, and in fact there's a much larger one just outside of town that we're going to be briefly seeing tomorrow. Come back to check it out!