The Market Report

Tiller & Rye Opened: 2015 Owner:  Sarah Morneault and Lindsey Levesque Previous Tenants:  Rite Aid > Brewer Discount Furniture Cooperative:  none Location:  20 S Main St, Brewer, ME Photographed:  June 13, 2022 I'll stop beating a dead horse someday soon, but there are so many supermarkets that have opened up in former Rite Aids and other drugstores in the last five years or so. Here's one from a bit before the current trend. This former Rite Aid in downtown Brewer briefly became a furniture store after closing, but since 2015 has been Tiller & Rye, a roughly 10,000 square foot specialty market. The exterior doesn't have a particularly distinct Rite Aid look, but my best guess is that the drugstore designed this facade to match the somewhat small-town setting. Neither the furniture store nor Tiller & Rye redid the outside extensively, but the inside has been remodeled. And as you can already tell from the outside, this is no typical supermarket...

John Edward's Market Opened: 1971 Owner:  John Pouwels Previous Tenants:  First National (opened ca. 1940) Cooperative:  none Location:  158 Main St, Ellsworth, ME Photographed:  June 17, 2022 Ellsworth is the larger town in this area, roughly between the Blue Hill Peninsula and Mount Desert Island. So this town actually has three full supermarkets, and today The Market Report tours the small independent store right downtown! John Edward's Market has been here since the 70s, but one look at the exterior will tell you this building has been a store for much longer than that. In fact, First National Stores (Finast) opened up here around 1940. These days, the roughly 6,000 square foot space is a natural food and specialty store. Wine is in the front-left corner, with produce just behind that on the left side of the store. Also in the first aisle is frozen food and, in a first for me, a service counter where a clerk fills your container with bulk herbs and spices....

Blue Hill Co-op Opened: 2019 in current location; 1974 previously Owner:  cooperatively owned Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  National Co-op Grocers Location:  70 South St, Blue Hill, ME Photographed:  June 14, 2022 Practically across the street from Tradewinds Marketplace (now Hannaford) here in Blue Hill, we find ourselves in another natural foods co-op. The Blue Hill Co-op started in 1974 and eventually moved into the first floor of a building at 4 Ellsworth Rd in town. When the co-op moved to its current, 15,000 square foot location in 2019, it was the largest co-op food store in Maine (not sure if that's still true). Here's a 2012 blog post that gives a little look at the old store. The new building, which was purpose-built for this co-op, is modern and attractive. You enter to the produce department on the right side of the store, with bulk foods at the back. Grab-and-go prepared foods and dairy are on the back wall, with frozen foods and cheese...

Belfast Community Co-op Opened: 1993 in current location; 1976 previously Owner:  cooperatively owned Previous Tenants:  Finast (opened ca. 1960) Cooperative:  National Co-op Grocers Location:  123 High St, Belfast, ME Photographed:  August 12, 2019 New England has at least dozens of co-op grocers , most of which are members of the National Co-op Grocers cooperative -- that is, basically a cooperative made up of cooperatives. In a co-op supermarket, the owners (usually just regular people who've bought a small share of the co-op) co-own the business, and then in this case, the business itself co-owns the retailers' cooperative. Belfast, Maine has had a community co-op for a couple decades, which opened here in a former Finast in 1993. I photographed the approximately 10,000 square foot supermarket back in 2019, but since then, it's gotten a major renovation. It was also rebranded from the Belfast Co-op Store to the Belfast Community Co-op. When I visited, the p...