Special Report: Food Bazaar Supermarket - West Hempstead, NY

Food Bazaar Supermarket
Opened: October 22, 2026

Owner: Spencer An

Previous Tenants: Stop & Shop (closed ca. 2005) > Western Beef (ca. 2014 - 2026)

Cooperative: none

Location: 605 Woodfield Rd, West Hempstead, NY

Photographed: October 30, 2025

In Hempstead, Food Bazaar took over a Stop & Shop in 2024. Now, they've taken over another former Stop & Shop in West Hempstead -- but it's not that simple. Stop & Shop closed up shop here around 2005, leaving this small, dated location for a state-of-the-art Super Stop & Shop across town. After extensive renovations, the approximately 35,000 square foot building reopened as a Western Beef around 2014. Western Beef, for their part, moved out of a much smaller centennial A&P store at 103 Woodfield Rd, which seems to still be vacant today. And here at 605 Woodfield, Western Beef has left the building and now it's...

...a Food Bazaar, of course. If you haven't noticed yet, The Market Report is in the middle of a blitz of coverage of the transition of 14 Western Beef stores to Food Bazaar. I've now posted nine of them, so look out for the remainder next weekend!

Like most of the conversions, not a whole lot has changed here yet. We see some new paint and a produce reset, as usual, but this store is another one that's in generally really good shape for now. The produce department is on the left side of the store, with bakery and deli at the back of the first aisle. Dairy lines the back wall and continues down the last aisle, with frozen foods also on the right side. Service seafood and a service pickle bar -- yes, you read that right (more on that shortly) -- are in the front-right corner along with the entrance to the walk-in meat cooler room.

I don't know what was here prior to Stop & Shop. I imagine it's likely that this store was a Foodtown that became an Edwards, but I haven't confirmed that for sure.

However, as you can see, the renovations that Western Beef did here before moving in were really extensive. There's no sign of this store's past lives inside or out.

New paint and the new wooden decorative panels, probably soon to act as frames for new decor, are up in the dairy department.

Okay, now for the pickle bar. In Western Beef, this was actually a separate vendor, a much-beloved local business called The Pickle People. Food Bazaar didn't want an outside vendor, so they seem to have kicked out The Pickle People, replacing it with their own Fairway-style pickle bar that Food Bazaar runs. Meanwhile, The Pickle People have found a new home over at the Cherry Valley Marketplace here in West Hempstead -- a truly incredible supermarket that I've photographed extensively but haven't posted yet. It's about a mile and a half north.

Here's a look at the seafood counter and entrance to the meat room, with the 1906 Butcher Shop branding replaced with Food Bazaar.

One interesting thing is that Food Bazaar has replaced the aisle markers in all these acquired stores with their signature ones built around a pallet, but that process hasn't gone exactly the same in all the locations. Here, we can see that some of the aisle markers are still using the category signs from the Western Beef ones (see the left, where the white and blue panels don't really match) while others are new (see the right, which clearly match better). Other stores have all of one or the other. Still others have a slightly different set of category panels, which are smaller and harder to read, in my opinion. I think it's likely the hodgepodge of leftover signs from Western Beef and new ones will be evened out over time.

Now for a look at this store in the Western Beef days...

As I've mentioned on other posts, it feels like Food Bazaar removed a little of the clutter and streamlined the stores a little bit.

It also makes sense that they removed some of the bigger, brighter, and more cartoony signage because they're positioned more as a mainstream supermarket, whereas Western Beef was more of a quirky value store.

One unusual observation: Food Bazaar seems to be having trouble keeping the gourmet cheese sections stocked in those Western Beef locations that have them. In this store, this cheese island you can see above was pretty sparse when I stopped by Food Bazaar. That's a little odd, given that Food Bazaar has extensive gourmet cheese programs in some of their other stores, but I think the issue might be that those stores cut cheese on-site, while these stores don't have prep space to do that. It seems strange to me that they're not able to simply fill the space with other cheese for now, though. I'm curious what's going to happen going forward with that.

Here's a look at The Pickle People's much more elaborate setup here. For now, Food Bazaar seems to be using a pared-down version of the Fairway pickle program, but I wonder what the long-term plans are for the pickles.

And that's all for this store, at least for now. There's definitely some interesting questions that come out of this big acquisition, and it's going to be fascinating to track what changes and what doesn't over time. For now, you can see the full list of Western Beef conversions here!