TOUR: Fine Fare Supermarkets - Soundview, Bronx, NY

Well, we've seen this store before. But now we're returning for a full tour! Built as a Food Fair, this store had a variation on the bounce arch that didn't bounce. It likely became a Pantry Pride and then a Key Food, converting to Fine Fare in 1993. The 28,000 square foot store is owned by Retail Grocers Group CEO Rudy Fuertes and was renovated around 2012.

And I suppose that it's no surprise Fuertes' stores are some of the nicest and best taken care of Fine Fare locations. We enter this one to find a rather Food Bazaar-like layout, with produce and meat in a room to the right as you enter, with dairy on the back wall and frozen in the second-to-last aisle. Deli is in the front corner.

I'm particularly a fan of the old Bronx pictures that are hanging over the produce and meat departments. A very nice local touch.

The meat and produce room is an expansion to the store. Meanwhile, the first aisle is the usual wall of values (or main display, as some stores call it), with fresh baked goods at the front. This store doesn't have an in-store bakery, but gets lots of baked goods from local bakeries -- since there are so many in the Bronx.

The grocery shelving is new, and the floor is nicely surfaced, but you can tell the bones of the store (such as the ceiling and lighting) are rather old.

Heading over to the grocery aisles, we see some very cool custom endcaps, and some extremely well-stocked aisles. (Stocking, however, was very much in progress at the time of my visit in the morning.)

And the store offers that same combination of Latin/Caribbean, basic groceries, and natural/organic that I've commented on at our other Fine Fares on Ogden Ave and 149th.

I've never seen pasta sauce so nicely organized.

Frozen foods, with some relatively new cases, is waiting for a lot of stock to be filled in the cases. There were multiple employees stocking frozen and dairy at the time of my visit.

Nonfoods are past frozen.

Notice that condiments, which are so often in the first aisle facing produce, are in the last aisle here.

Deli in the front corner, with a very nice updated front end.

Fine Fare Supermarkets

1221 Fteley Ave, Soundview, Bronx, NY
Photographed March 2019