The Market Report

Amazon Fresh Opening: TBA Owner:  Amazon Previous Tenants:  Stop & Shop > Foodtown Cooperative:  none Location:  225 Ridgedale Ave, Cedar Knolls, NJ Photographed:  January 21 and 31, 2025 Another new Amazon Fresh is on its way ! The growing-yet-struggling chain is pushing forward with certain planned locations and it seems the former Foodtown in Cedar Knolls will be up next. Amazon has remodeled the building and expanded it to around 45,000 square feet, and you can see the facade is a bit different from the previous generation of stores. There remain a number of Amazon Fresh stores fully built, but not yet opened, across the country, while others have been sold or canceled . Amazon Fresh's strategy -- if they have one -- has yet to reveal itself to the public, and meanwhile, their execution is confusing and haphazard. So we'll see, because bigger transformations have happened before. It's entirely possible that, with a recent management change , Amaz...

Original Tenant: Foodtown Address: 831 NJ-10, Whippany, Hanover, NJ Opened:  1991 Closed:  ca. 2000 Later Tenants:  Pathmark (ca. 2000-2011) > Farmtastic Supermarket (2014-2015) Photographed:  June 2020 Part 2 of our Pine Plaza coverage deals with this larger supermarket, built in 1991 by Michas Brothers Foodtown as a replacement for a much smaller store in a former A&P next door, which is part 1 . Michas Brothers (later Manyfoods) sold the 35,000 square foot store to Pathmark around 2000, which in turn closed in 2011 as the 20-year lease expired. In Cedar Knolls , we saw a Michas > Manyfoods > LaRacca Foodtown which then closed in early 2014. Well, a few months after the LaRaccas closed Cedar Knolls, they opened this location as Farmtastic Supermarket which lasted all of about 18 months before closing for good in mid to late 2015. As I mention in the A&P post, Pine Plaza is in an extensive redevelopment process which involved clearing out all of t...

Original Tenant: A&P Address: 831 NJ-10, Whippany, Hanover, NJ Opened:  1960s Closed:  1980s Later Tenants:  Foodtown (1980s-1991) Photographed:  June 2020 We arrive at the massive Pine Plaza in the Whippany section of Hanover Township once again after initially taking a look at the closed Farmtastic Supermarket back in 2018 . We're revisiting the Farmtastic location today as well, but the older supermarket in the mall is this centennial A&P, built in the early 60s and closing in the early to mid 80s. By the mid to late 80s, the A&P had become a Foodtown, which by 1991 moved down to an expansion of the plaza. Pine Plaza's property occupies nearly 20 acres of land but is completely vacant, awaiting redevelopment. Check out the Farmtastic post for more info on where the development is and what's happened lately. Tomorrow, we have two stores (one here on Grocery Archaeology and one over on The Market Report ) to finish out our Greater Morristown group!

Wegmans Food Markets Opened: 2017 Previous Tenants:  none Location: 34 Sylvan Way, Hanover, NJ Photographed:  December 2020 It's been a while since we last toured a Wegmans (I guess that was Hornell back in December 2020?) and interestingly enough, I posted that store within a few weeks of photographing this one. The 113,000 square foot store is incredibly deluxe and features a gigantic cafe and liquor store. It is, however, very similar to most of the other Wegmans stores from the last decade or two. The enormous location opened in 2017 in an isolated spot nearly half a mile off of route 10, but in a very visible spot facing interstate 287, from which you can see but not access the store. Now I'm unsure exactly how to start this tour, so let's head in to the food court in the front right corner. The liquor store is also in the front right corner, with deli and then butcher/seafood along the right side of the grand aisle; produce and bakery are on the left side of the gra...

ShopRite of Greater Morristown Owner: Robert Sumas / Village Super Market Opened:  2013 Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  Wakefern Food Corp. Location: 178 E Hanover Ave, Cedar Knolls, Hanover, NJ Photographed:  July 2016 The 78,000 square foot flagship Village ShopRite finally comes to the blog five and a half years after I initially photographed it! And because these were early pictures on a long-ago iPhone, please excuse the picture quality; I'll have to go back to redo this tour at some point. Designed to counter the planned Wegmans nearby in Parsippany, this gigantic store replaced the much smaller and 1970s-era Morris Plains ShopRite in 2013. This was the first generation of Village Food Garden stores; Stirling and Livingston were the other two and Union opened at the same but was never branded with VFG. This store's layout is fairly standard for Village but just rotated 90 degrees. The right side wall of the store is the front-end, so we enter to phar...