The Market Report

Gala Foods Supermarket Opened: September 9, 2025 Owner:  Edwin Gutierrez Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  Key Food Stores Location:  1759 Middle Country Rd, Centereach, NY Photographed:  October 3, 2025 Greetings from Long Island, where I recently spent a day. Living in New Jersey, it's not exactly easy to get across to Long Island -- even parts of Queens can be upwards of three hours for a distance that's barely 30 miles -- so I don't often post stores from the eastern suburbs of New York City. But here we are in Centereach, a hamlet about 50 miles east of midtown Manhattan, where the Aurora Grocery Group has just opened its latest store. At 21,000 square feet, it's not a large supermarket, but it's spacious and open. It's a new-build store, part of a newly constructed strip mall on Middle Country Road, which is a main thoroughfare through this area. This is actually the only supermarket within Centereach, but that doesn't meat we're far from othe...

Food Universe Marketplace Owner:  unknown Opened:  2019 Previous Tenants:  ShopRite > Pathmark > Food Basics > GalaFresh Farms Cooperative:  Key Food Stores Location:  498 E 30th St, Paterson, NJ Photographed:  August 2019 Yesterday's rather depressing store tour is as good a transition as any to today's success story. Built in 1965 as a ShopRite, this store became a Pathmark in 1968 when its owner, Supermarkets General Corp., split from the Wakefern cooperative. When Pathmark was purchased by A&P in 2008, the 37,000 square foot store was deemed too small to remain in the Pathmark group, while its profitability was slipping in a somewhat economically depressed neighborhood. The store was converted to a Food Basics, A&P's discount banner, with the removal of all the service departments. (The pharmacy, however, was kept.) In the 2015-16 bankruptcy, this and the nearby Van Houten Food Basics in Passaic were sold to Aurora...

We are returning to the former Compare Foods in Worcester, MA for today's tour! We first saw the store back in November 2017 in a Snapshot of the outside of the store. This photo was originally from my visit in July 2017, so it's been a while! The slightly off-model Compare Foods logo, the 1950s-inspired clip art on the sign over the entrance, and the fact that the photos in the windows are actually photos of this very store, all combine to make the exterior...less than spectacular. However, at least two of those have been changed! I happened to visit soon after the Gala Foods logo went up, in August 2018. A new Gala Foods sign had been placed where the Compare Foods sign used to be, and some of the photos in the windows had been covered by a banner advertising the coming of Gala Foods. You can see the outline of where the Compare logo used to be. When I returned a few days later, the facade had begun to be painted, although the part immediately around the logo was n...