The Market Report

Donelan's Fresh Market Opened: 1959 Owner:  Gohal and Mohanbhai Patel Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  248 Great Rd, Acton, MA Photographed:  May 11, 2023 Happy Valentine's Day, and it's let's celebrate by visiting another Donelan's! We've seen their location in Littleton along with a former location in Pepperell , and now it's time for Acton. (Sadly, we won't be seeing the locations in Wayland or Lincoln , which I haven't been to.) At around 32,000 square feet, this store is slightly larger than Wayland, Lincoln, and Pepperell, but smaller than Littleton. The supermarket dates back to 1959 but has been expanded and renovated pretty significantly. It appears to have been renovated a bit more recently than Littleton, but both are very nice stores. The layout is a bit different from Littleton, too. A cafe is in the front-left corner of the store, with prepared foods and some self-serve prepared food bars around it, then deli and...

Donelan's Fresh Market Opened: 2021 under current ownership; 1957 previously Owner:  Gohal and Mohanbhai Patel Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  236 Great Rd, Littleton, MA Photographed:  October 9, 2021 and December 10, 2023 We recently saw the Pepperell Quality Market , and in that post I mentioned that the owners of that store acquired the Donelan's chain after buying that location around 2020. The four-store chain started here in Littleton back in 1948 , eventually building today's Littleton Donelan's in 1957 and expanding and renovating several times, most recently expanded in the 1970s and renovated in the early 00s or so. Following the sale of the chain, the new owners rebranded slightly to Donelan's Fresh Market, with a slightly new logo. The picture below shows the store in December 2023 post-rebrand; the rest of these pictures come from October 2021. Today, the store is around 40,000 square feet, quite a bit smaller than the Marke...

Pepperell Quality Market Opened: ca. 2020 Owner:  Gohal and Mohanbhai Patel Previous Tenants:  Donelan's (1994-ca. 2020) Cooperative:  none Location:  75 Main St, Pepperell, MA Photographed:  October 9, 2021 In our last few stores, it definitely didn't feel like Worcester anymore, but everything we saw in the Wachusett and Montachusett regions was still in Worcester County. Now we're just over the border in the town of Pepperell, population around 11,000. In 1994, local chain Donelan's built a store of just under 14,000 square feet, it seems replacing an older building on the same property (not sure if it was a grocery store or not). Donelan's operated the store until about 2020, when they sold this location to independent owners, Gohal and Mohanbhai Patel, who renamed the store Pepperell Quality Market. In an interesting twist, in 2021, they also acquired the other Donelan's locations, which continue to operate as Donelan's (and we'll be seeing a coupl...