SPECIAL REPORT: Food Bazaar - Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY

SOFT OPENING

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Food Bazaar Supermarket, Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY

Another brief interruption to take a look at a brand-new store! Iconic New York City chain Fairway Market went bankrupt for the second time in January of 2020, announcing its intentions to close or sell all of its locations. The name and distribution center along with five of the stores were sold to Village Super Market, which owns approximately 30 ShopRite locations and 3 Gourmet Garage locations for $76 million, just barely beating out a competing bid from Bogopa Service Corporation, operators of the Food Bazaar Supermarkets chain, for $75 million. Food Bazaar didn't get the core stores, but they did acquire two locations in Red Hook, Brooklyn and Douglaston, Queens, which closed on Wednesday night and reopened just hours later at 7am on Thursday, August 13th as Food Bazaars. Bogopa has also bid on another store in Westbury, NY, which is expected to be approved. I visited the Red Hook location about 11:30am yesterday to find the store in an exciting transition period. Anyone who knows me knows Food Bazaar is probably my favorite supermarket chain, or at least top 3. So you can imagine how exciting it was to see the tired old Fairway location which first opened in 2006 being transformed into an all-out Food Bazaar with some of the signature Fairway touches being incorporated.

You enter to the first room, which is produce and floral. If you zoom in to the price signs on the left, you can see Food Bazaar's typical signs affixed on top of the older Fairway ones. Not all of the price tags have been switched, and I noticed quite a few of the Fairway prices were significantly more expensive than the Food Bazaar ones -- since I shop at Food Bazaar weekly and know the prices rather well.

Bogopa actually purchased the store along with all of its merchandise, so Fairway didn't even do a store closing sale here. It's hard to tell how much of the produce selection is Food Bazaar's new items and how much is still left from Fairway and will be discontinued once it's sold out -- but that's actually true across the store.

An overview of the produce room. Since it's very much divided into rooms, the layout doesn't flow like a regular supermarket. But the 60,000 square foot store is quite substantial in size and selection.

The bulk nuts and dried fruit selection has been fully turned over to Baro, a favorite brand of mine and a Food Bazaar storebrand.

The next room has the service counters, with deli on the front wall. The gourmet cheese counter lines the right-side wall of that section with more cheese in islands in the middle. Food Bazaar stores typically have much smaller cheese selections than this, so I wonder how much of the selection they'll be keeping. For right now, all of the cheeses are wrapped and packaged with Food Bazaar labels, so it looks like they're committing to the cheese counter.

An island behind the cheese department features the service butcher and seafood counters. For whatever reason, the meat department was not fully set up at the time of my visit. Both the service counter and the self-service cases, which are just out of frame to the right, were a little sparsely stocked. Although the seafood counter is beautiful, it's actually much smaller than most Food Bazaars'.

Beautiful butcher case, though.

Seafood on the other side of the island. To the left of seafood is a separate room for natural and organic products, with the wall facing it as a huge selection of organic bulk foods. These are all holdovers from Fairway, as Food Bazaar usually incorporates natural and organic selections into the regular grocery aisles and doesn't put bulk departments, but it again seems that they'll be keeping both of these features.

Through the doorways you can see here, you enter to the natural/organic room. Notably missing from the shelves in this section or in the store at all was any of the Seven Farms organic storebrand products featured prominently at other stores. I'm assuming, like the Bogopa storebrand products, they'll be phased in over time. (Bogopa items were beginning to hit the shelves at the time of my visit.)

As Fairway was an upscale gourmet store, they had a wide selection of natural/organic products. Food Bazaar also carries a lot of these items, but frequently different brands. We'll have to see how the selection changes over time.

In fact, this section has no storebrand items at all. It will be nice for the selection of Seven Farms to reach this section. (Food Bazaar's third storebrand, Hy-Top, which is made by The Federated Group of Arlington Heights, IL and distributed by Bozzuto's of Cheshire, CT, also has not reached the shelves. I'm assuming this store simply hasn't gotten a Bozzuto's delivery yet.)

As you can see, there's quite a large selection of natural/organic items here.

Moving out into the main room of the store, we find the natural/organic health and beauty section mostly replaced with pallets of new stock (most of it Bogopa brand) waiting to be placed on the shelves. Food Bazaars don't typically have health and beauty departments, much less natural vitamin departments, so this will likely be converted to a Wall of Values-type area. That would be my guess, anyway.

Bogopa soda crackers and coconut milk ready for the shelves!

Next corner of the store is olive oil! Fairway was famous for its free olive oil samples, but Food Bazaar probably will not continue this tradition. Their selection is still enormous, including this clearance display of Fresh and Beyond bottles. (Fresh and Beyond was the temporary brand Fairway introduced after Village bought the rights to the Fairway name. That said, the former owners didn't honor their agreement to immediately cease using the name per the purchase agreement, prompting a lawsuit from Village which they are likely to win.)

Coffee and tea is next, even with an in-store coffee roaster machine and barrels of bulk coffee. Temporarily, I'm assuming as a coronavirus precaution, the coffee is served and packaged by an employee.

The bakery, which is not fully set up yet, is next along the back wall. Only part of the bread counter was stocked, with the rest coming soon. The next cases, which are self-service, contain rolls, bagels, and pastries/muffins. Interestingly, Food Bazaar seems to have adopted Fairway's bagel and pastry program, with the same selections that Fairway had. But the rolls are identical to the rolls I've bought weekly at the Elizabeth Food Bazaar since opening week. And I must say... I had an almond croissant this morning from this store, and they'd do well to leave that recipe dead with Fairway and start making the almond croissants I buy at Elizabeth Food Bazaar. The bakery otherwise was excellent.

Fairway, though, was famous for its store-made bagels.

First aisle features health and beauty items along with paper products.

As you can see, the selection in this aisle is being modified, probably to cut back the selection of nonfood items to expand grocery selection.

Fairway was not one for international foods, which is where Food Bazaar will greatly expand selection. There are small Latin, Italian, and Middle Eastern sections, but I'm assuming that will all be expanded over time, probably by decreasing nonfoods selection (like cleaning products and pet food).

Soda and chips towards the side of the store. The grocery aisles are split in half front-to-back.

At the far end in the back is a prepared foods department, with a hot food and salad bar (which are partially open for the time being), along with a coffee/sandwich counter, a sushi bar, pizza/grill, and a chopped salad counter.

There's also a cafe seating area which, per New York coronavirus plans, is closed temporarily.

Food Bazaar does not yet have a permit to sell beer, which would've taken up this aisle under Fairway and which will likely be beer once again soon enough.

Dairy aisle has made a quick transition, with Bogopa orange juice and shredded cheese already on the shelves. As you can see, there's lots more stock ready to go out.

Frozen foods take up the last two aisles, which are short.

Seems that there are some leaking cases here, which Food Bazaar will probably fix soon enough.

A look across the front-end to customer service, which backs up to the produce department. The self-checkout register area had been removed, and temporarily stacked with lots and lots of pallets of product ready to go out on the shelves. Quite a few of the endcaps are Bogopa brand products, probably because there isn't yet enough space on the shelves to stock the storebrand items next to the name brand items. Anyway, it's awesome that Food Bazaar has grown again and you couldn't ask for better stores to bring into the Food Bazaar group! We'll see how much renovation and other changes go on here, as the stores are already in great shape but there will be some modifications and improvements to go into the store over time. The new Food Bazaar is located at 480 Van Brunt St, Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY.