The Market Report

ShopRite Opened:  April 9, 2025 Owner:  Village Super Market Previous Tenants:  assorted non-grocery tenants Cooperative:  Wakefern Food Corp. Location:  1701 US-22, Watchung, NJ Photographed:  July 23, 2025 We're back at the Watchung ShopRite to check out what the heck is going on. To recap: Village Super Market owns about 30 ShopRite stores, and about 10 more under the Fairway and Gourmet Garage brands in NYC. They brought the Fairway and Gourmet Garage brands into some of their other locations, with Fairway-branded coffee, cheese, and bakery departments, and Gourmet Garage-branded prepared foods. Then, at the end of May, Village very abruptly removed all of those branded items and departments. The Gourmet Garage-branded prepared foods are now packaged with labels devoid of any branding at all, and the Fairway and Gourmet Garage brands have been meticulously removed from all Village ShopRite stores. In Watchung , and possibly Old Bridge , signs reading "V...

I hope your spring break is wonderful -- although, at least for my part of New Jersey, it's still gray and rainy and cold. I'm interrupting my planned break to post about something that might  be big news, although it's really difficult to tell just how significant the scope of the change might be. We're here in northern New Jersey to visit some of the Village Super Market-owned ShopRite stores. VSM owns about 30 ShopRites in NJ, NY, PA, and MD, and a handful of Gourmet Garage and Fairway stores in New York City. They've recently remodeled several stores, including Bernardsville and Springfield , and just under two months ago unveiled a spectacular new store in Watchung replacing an older location. About a year ago, Village began introducing Gourmet Garage and Fairway branded items at their ShopRite stores. (See here .) I was tipped off by a message from a reader who works in the industry saying he was told that, about three weeks ago, employees of a Village-owne...

ShopRite Opened: April 9, 2025 Owner:  Village Super Market Previous Tenants:  assorted non-grocery tenants Cooperative:  Wakefern Food Corp. Location:  1701 US-22, Watchung, NJ Photographed:  April 9, 2025 Welcome to the brand-new ShopRite of Watchung! This state-of-the-art, newly-built store just opened on Wednesday and is holding its official grand opening celebration tomorrow. A ShopRite has been at the Blue Star Mall for decades -- in fact, it looks like there's been a ShopRite here since the 1950s, and under the ownership of Village Super Market since the mid-1970s. It was remodeled in 1981, but then not again since (although it appears to have gotten some minimal painting and cosmetic work). That store closed Tuesday. You can tour it here . And you can see the old ShopRite storefront to the left in the below image. The old store was much smaller than the new one, at just 35,000 square feet. I don't fully know just how big the new one is -- the property o...