The Market Report

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...

New Oriental Supermarket Opened: 2005 Owner:  Peter Chen Previous Tenants:  unknown Cooperative:  none Location:  476 King St, Littleton, MA Photographed:  October 9, 2021 There are small Asian-American communities in a few of the Massachusetts suburbs to the northwest of Boston, and serving those communities are a handful of small independent Asian grocers. (In some areas, larger Asian-American immigrant communities are served by larger chain grocers -- but in areas like Littleton, where only 8% of the town's 10,000 people are of Asian descent, there's just not a market for a larger store like an H Mart.) In Littleton, the New Oriental Supermarket fills that gap, a small store of just 3200 square feet. While I don't know for sure, I think it's fairly likely that prior to New Oriental's opening in 2005, this space was a convenience store or a similar business. There are a few rows of grocery aisles, some refrigerated and frozen items, and a few cases of produce...

Market Basket Opened: 2014 Owner:  DeMoulas family Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  301 Constitution Ave, Littleton, MA Photographed:  October 9, 2021 I mentioned last week that Shaw's, despite having a large presence in a lot of eastern Massachusetts, has only a limited store base in Middlesex County . Part of that has to do with what else is in Middlesex County: Market Basket's headquarters. The powerhouse chain of just under 100 high-volume stores (and counting) came to Littleton, just 13 miles from their headquarters of Tewksbury, in 2014 with a new-build store of around 65,000 square feet. It's a very straightforward Market Basket -- as we have discussed, most Market Baskets are essentially the same -- but just for fun, we're going to tour this store in the reverse order from how I usually set up the Market Basket posts. We're going to start on the right side, which is the last aisles. The Market's Cafe is in the front-right corner, wi...