The Food Emporium
Owner: Ki Hyung (Kevin) Kim
Opened: 2016-2017
Previous Tenants: Pathmark
Later Tenants: Superfresh > LIDL
Cooperative: Key Food Stores
Location: 10 South Ave, Garwood, NJ
Photographed: August 2016, April 2017, July 2017, and November 2020
It's time now for another store owned by Kevin Kim, whose Belleville store we most recently saw.
The first Food Emporium to open in New Jersey, this store was considered an alternative to the nearby ShopRite, which has an insanely crowded and badly-designed parking lot. Unfortunately, there's a reason the Garwood ShopRite is always packed: it's the best supermarket in the area. There's also a Kings that took over a former Stop & Shop just about half a mile west on South Avenue from this Food Emporium. That'll be our next stop!
That tough competition combined with this store's clearly incompetent management team led this to be, like Belleville or Fairview, a crash-and-burn situation. In late 2016 or early 2017, seemingly out of desperation, the store was converted from The Food Emporium to SuperFresh. The pharmacy never opened in this store, and the "Pharmacy Department" signs were covered with banners so that it now read "Garwood Farmers Market Department". We'll be taking a look at the store post-closing after the tour.
Key Food van from Kim's now-closed location in New Brunswick.
Here you can see how absurdly large the parking lot was, but also how empty the store was as it was celebrating its grand opening.
Ah, the Pathmark carts! These ended up at multiple other stores that Kim owned after this one closed, off the top of my head I know I saw them at Belleville, Fairview, and Plainsboro.
Pathmark entrance signs still intact. And that's not all...
Pathmark's commitment to community and the environment!
You enter in this hallway behind the pharmacy counter before turning right past a coffee shop into produce, which lines both sides of an extra-wide aisle. Health and beauty used to be to the right of the produce department, but it was never reopened. Deli, seafood, and butcher are on the back wall with frozen and dairy at the far end, and bakery and customer service in the far corner of the store on the front-end. As we'll see, nearly all of the decor was left over from Pathmark.
I don't think the coffee shop lasted longer than a month or two.
Produce with pharmacy/HABA section closed off to the right...
Pathmark signage abounds.
The pharmacy never opened, and the only HABA selection was over at customer service. I wonder whether the pharmacy was ever truly planned to open.
Large section of the 52,000 square foot store is now just empty. The decor, which was falling apart, is left from Pathmark except for the black-and-white photo towards the back. Where you can see the banner hanging from the ceiling is a cheese counter, which I'm assuming was in place when Pathmark was here.
The store was very attractively merchandised for my first visit, but that went downhill almost immediately. By my second visit, the produce department had been cut back to about 2/3 of the original selection, with just bottled water and beverages filling the remaining cases.
As you can see, the back deli area extends behind the closed-off section for deli and a cafe (where Kevin Kim was sitting on one of my visits, looking at what seemed to be other stores' circulars).
Sushi was really the only prepared foods counter to open, and it closed before the store did.
Pathmark's deli sign had been removed and replaced with a simple Boar's Head sign on the existing corrugated metal panel.
It's hard to tell how much of this section is left from Pathmark, but I'd assume at the very least the cheese counter is.
Again, this area looked beautiful for opening but was quickly cut way back. I believe this area closed before the rest of the store did.
Looking along the back wall, seafood is next with its Pathmark decor still intact (although the aisle markers are custom!). The seafood sign, however, and the aisle markers, were moved to Bell Farms in Belleville.
As with the other departments, seafood was cut back to about 1/2 of this size very quickly. I think deli was the only perishable department that was never cut back.
A designated natural foods section (left over from Pathmark) lines both sides of the first aisle, or aisle 5. A little odd given that nearly all of these products were duplicated in the general grocery section.
Main display lining the right side (closest to produce) of aisle 6.
Meats line the rest of the back wall, with Pathmark decor still fully intact.
Aisle 13 is a double-wide aisle with international foods. There was a broad selection, but I'm not sure that any of it was particularly in line with the demographics of the area. Garwood is a fairly affluent suburban town -- perhaps the most important international selection to feature is the Italian section, which was actually in a different aisle.
Grocery aisles look just like a Pathmark!
Frozen foods in the second-to-last aisle with some very nice custom Food Emporium category markers.
Milk in the back corner.
Dairy lines both sides of the last aisle. Again, all of this decor is intact from the Pathmark days.
New decor over in the bakery department in the front corner.
Looks good, but the in-store bakery was not functional (I don't think it ever opened in The Food Emporium at all). Hudson Bread, a local bakery, had set up a counter that never opened all the way just around the corner here.
I bought bread a few times here, and it was always stale. It's a shame because Hudson Bread is very good bread. Customer service, and the HABA section, is just to the left.
Because there is a tiny but full HABA selection here, I doubt the pharmacy section was ever intended to be opened.
The front end has some modifications from Pathmark.
The registers are left from Pathmark, but the register lane markers have been updated with a nice Food Emporium insert. Pathmark would've had product ads here.
And, there's been some nice decals added to the registers themselves. I wish these were more common since these look great!
One more look across the front-end before we head out...
Now, I returned in April 2017 (reminder: not even a full year after my first visit) to photograph the store after it had closed. We see it with the Superfresh/Garwood Farmers Market branding. First, let me show you how strategic Pathmark's positioning was, especially the sign...
You can't miss that Superfresh sign!
Notice that a full Superfresh sign was never installed, instead just having hung a banner over The Food Emporium logo. The window graphics still had the Food Emporium logo.
These people look very nice. Oh, if only they knew the store they were now representing...
The Super Center signage is left over from Pathmark.
Now fast-forward to July 2017. I returned once again to photograph the store including the interior...
A "space available" sign had been hung over the Superfresh banner, but it blew up onto the roof of the store.
Ah yes, full-watermark Shutterstock!
The Pathmark solar energy sign was still there, along with all The Food Emporium branding. That was never changed for Superfresh.
Looking in through the old entrance/exit doors. Going around the corner, we can catch a glimpse of the interior of the store...
This is the hallway that you would enter through on the left side of the store. A stream runs along the side of the store, making it impossible to photograph the interior any more than this. LIDL will be taking about 25,000 square feet of this store. Now on to November 2020 for pre-LIDL pictures... a year after LIDL had been announced, still no work had begun other than removing all of the Food Emporium signage.
Pharmacy sign just painted over...
The best look we're going to get at the building is from the far end of the parking lot here. The rest of the lot was fenced off.
The gigantic parking lot was completely closed off, and there are plans to build an outparcel at the far end here. The building will be renovated, but not too extensively -- certainly scaled well back from the earlier LIDL stores.
The main sign for The Food Emporium had been removed, as well as the decals with the pictures in the windows. All the shopping carts are long gone, and it seemed the only thing left along the storefront was some barrels...
Okay, that's all! After that ridiculously long tour (very possibly my longest yet), we are heading to the west to see Garwood's final remaining supermarket we haven't toured yet! That'll be tomorrow here on The Market Report.
When did Superfresh close and why?
ReplyDeleteFrom the beginning, this store was poorly managed and had issues with everything from product mix to stocking. SuperFresh was under the same owner, Kevin Kim, as The Food Emporium, and closed in early spring 2017. (Kim appears to since have left the grocery business, closing or selling all of his stores.)
DeleteOh, he isn’t leaving. He’s got plans to open up two stores in north Jersey soon (Clifton and Passaic). Stay tuned.
Delete(This is Chris P. from the Clifton Stop & Shop if you remember me. 🙂)
Hi Chris, of course I remember you! And so this becomes really interesting. You're right -- he has two stores on the way, but what I was unaware of is that he actually bought the Bloomfield SuperFresh around 2019/2020. Now I've been back to that store quite a few times since then, including just about two weeks ago, and I don't know what changed but that store is always spotless, fully stocked, and fully staffed every time I'm there. Produce, meat, and seafood are excellent, grocery selection is solid and international selection is fantastic. I don't know why this is a total turnaround from how these earlier stores were run but all I'll say is that I hope Clifton and Passaic are more like Bloomfield than these older stores like Garwood or Edison.
DeleteI don't know if you've seen, but I recently visited both stores and here's my posts:
Clifton - https://www.marketreportblog.com/2023/01/special-report-superfresh-downtown.html
Passaic - http://groceryarchaeology.marketreportblog.com/2023/01/514-van-houten-ave-passaic-nj.html