The Market Report

LIDL Opened: January 29, 2025 Owner:  The Schwarz Group Previous Tenants:  Michaels Cooperative:  none Location:  459 Gateway Dr, East New York, Brooklyn, NY Photographed:  March 21, 2025 Welcome to the largest strip mall in New York City, the Gateway Center! Located way out in East New York, Brooklyn -- for out-of-towners, that's ten miles southeast of Times Square, which may as well be a different country -- the mall spans nearly 90 acres, which is absolutely enormous but especially large for New York City. And the mall is home to three supermarkets -- a ShopRite , an ALDI, and this brand-new LIDL in a recently-closed Michaels. At around 40,000 square feet, it's much larger than the 16,000 square foot ALDI but less than half the size of the 90,000+ square foot ShopRite, which is New York City's largest supermarket. (Edit: I removed a list of the next-largest supermarkets in the city here, because my numbers were wrong. Working on fixing it.) There's only...

Food Bazaar Supermarket Opening: TBA Owner:  Spencer An Previous Tenants:  Linden Multiplex Cinemas Cooperative:  none Location:  2784 Linden Blvd, East New York, Brooklyn, NY Photographed:  March 21, 2025 Most of my Food Bazaar-related attention lately has gone to the acquired Stop & Shop stores, but in addition to those four, they have several other projects in progress. The largest is here in East New York, Brooklyn, where they've acquired a former movie theater and its massive property. The building, which is between 65,000 and 70,000 square feet, is being prepared to become the largest Food Bazaar in Brooklyn. Food Bazaar acquired the property, which includes this building and its parking lot along with two neighboring parking lots, in the summer of 2023. But the movie theater continued to lease the space from Food Bazaar until it closed in January of 2024, when the supermarket chain began construction. Since it was a movie theater, there aren't exact...

Ashley Marketplace Open: 2013-March 2025 Owner:  Cheol Kim Previous Tenants:  Village Super Market > ShopRite > Village Market > Garden of Eden Marketplace Cooperative:  Krasdale Foods Location:  1 South Orange Ave, South Orange, NJ Photographed:  March 16, 2025 After my latest visit to South Orange's Ashley Marketplace , it was pretty clear that the end was near. And the store did in fact close recently, I believe around the end of February or beginning of March. A handwritten sign on the front door informs customers that it's temporarily closed. I don't know if that's true, but a colleague who lives in town told me he (unintentionally) visited the store on its last day in business and talked to the manager, who told him they're closing for renovations to (in his words) "build a real supermarket." Hard to tell what that means, but we'll just have to wait and see! It's unclear if the store has been sold, but as you can see in the above im...

ShopRite Opening:  TBA Owner:  Village Super Market Previous Tenants:  non-grocery tenants Cooperative:  Wakefern Food Corp. Location:  1701 US-22, Watchung, NJ Photographed:  March 10, 2025 Contributor:  Steve M. A brief look here at the ShopRite in Watchung, which is preparing to move to a spot in the mall previously occupied by a Toys R Us and Babies R Us. You can tour the extremely dated existing store here , and see a previous update from our contributor Steve M. here . He's also sent in the above picture, showing the exterior nearly complete. If the store is anything like Village Super Market's spectacular Old Bridge location , it's sure to be a success! I forgot just how great that store is until I revisited recently. Village's newer stores are really top-of-the-line, but they're inconsistent in execution meaning that some of their locations are poorly run while others are spectacular. I'll be back when this store opens up. In the meantime, don'...

SuperFresh Opened: July 31, 2020 Owner:  Kevin Kim Previous Tenants:  ShopRite > Pathmark Cooperative:  Key Food Stores Location:  101 New Brunswick Ave, Hopelawn, NJ Photographed:  March 20, 2025 There's a lot of SuperFresh news lately! In this post, we'll be seeing some changes going on at the Linden and Hopelawn locations, and a Met Foods in Brooklyn recently switched over to SuperFresh . Starting with Hopelawn! The store is still relatively new, having opened in the summer of 2020 . But it's one of three SuperFresh stores that apparently went up for sale this winter. The new owner, Kevin Kim, took over about a month ago. More on that shortly. The store still basically looks the same -- and, to be clear, it'll remain a SuperFresh with no significant changes, since it was just a sale from one SuperFresh owner to another. They're building a new counter in the front corner of the store next to the entrance, which looks like it may be a new customer service c...

SuperFresh Opened: March 12, 2025 Owner:  unknown Previous Tenants:  Met Foodmarkets Cooperative:  Key Food Stores Location:  3404 Quentin Rd, Brooklyn, NY Photographed:  March 21, 2025 It's time to visit the latest SuperFresh store! There are around 30, and they're independently-owned supermarkets affiliated with Key Food Stores. But the brand SuperFresh was introduced back in 1983 by A&P, which used it on Philadelphia-area stores. Key Food acquired the brand when A&P went under in 2015, and today has stores in Florida, north and central Jersey, New York City and Long Island, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island under the name. The latest is also, I believe, the smallest, at just 4500 square feet. You can tell right away from the outside that this is an old-school store. It's been here for decades, although I don't know what was here for most of that time. But from 1988 to this month, it was a Met Foods, changing ownership twice during that time. It looks l...

Amaral's Central Market Opened: 1978; ca. 2010 in this location Owner:  David Amaral Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  872 Globe St, Fall River, MA Photographed:  October 14, 2024 I mentioned on yesterday's post about Portugalia Marketplace that there's a large Portuguese community in this part of southeastern MA, and today's store is no exception. Amaral's Central Market opened in 1978 in a smaller store (a picture of which you can see below, posted on the storefront), specializing in Portuguese foods. When they moved from the 4300 square foot store to this newly-built store of 22,000 square feet around 2010, the supermarket was of course able to sell a wider range of foods and is now a general supermarket with a lot of Portuguese items. The best thing about the history of Amaral's? The old store is directly across the street, today occupied by Dave's Pizza. Let's tour the new location! Although it's much larger, it's also ...