Update: ShopRite - Bloomfield, NJ

ShopRite of Brookdale
Owner: Neil Greenstein

Opened: 1999

Previous Tenants: none

Cooperative: Wakefern Food Corp.

Location: 1409 Broad St, Bloomfield, NJ

Photographed: June 2021

We are returning to the Bloomfield ShopRite! (Also known as the Brookdale ShopRite because of its location in the Brookdale neighborhood of Bloomfield, so named for its proximity to Brookdale Park.) This ShopRite opened in 1999 as a new-build store replacing an older location on the same property, and I photographed it way back in May of 2016 but it didn't make it to the blog until April 2019. In late 2020, an extensive remodel began on the 60,000 square foot property, including a much-needed rearrangement of the parking lot. The storefront was also redone, as we can see compared to my 2016 photo.

This store has long been a favorite of this part of Essex County, since it's always been a well-run store, but it's generally a nightmare to navigate. The layout has been significantly streamlined with the current remodel, with more space around, and a much higher ceiling giving the illusion of more space. The decor hadn't quite been installed at the time of my visit towards the end of June, but we can see some serious progress.

Customers are greeted with this giant sign reading "Celebrating Great Food with Quality Service." You then enter to the grand aisle, starting with one of Wakefern's new "Fresh to Table" concepts. It includes prepared foods to heat up and other prepared items, such as cut produce. It also includes a large prepared foods department that hadn't yet opened at the time of my visit. The layout is more or less the same, with produce on the left side of the grand aisle and prepared foods, deli, and seafood in an island on the right. Pharmacy is on the other side of that island facing the grocery aisles. Bakery, meat, and dairy line the back wall with frozen in the second-to-last and last aisles, and dairy facing in the last aisle. I commented on this in my first post about this store, but despite the store's large size and large prepared foods department, there is inexplicably no in-store seating area.

Even though the renovation was only partially completed at the time of my visit, you can tell that the store is going to be beautiful! The prepared foods area is at the front of the island to the right, the back of which has the tarps hanging from the ceiling.

I'm interested in how this is being set up. If I haven't previously mentioned it, I work in foodservice, and have recently been putting a lot of thought into self-service vs. served stations in a cafeteria/food court setting, so the post-coronavirus setup they have here interests me. These seem to be the same glass guards that we use, which kind of slide up and down to either cover the food or angle above it as a sneeze guard for self-service. But the soup bar confuses me -- there's clearly the setup for self-service cups at the bottom, but then a panel of glass in front of the warmers! I'll have to go back and see how they ended up arranging that. (For the record, the customer in me loves self-service buffets but the foodservice manager in me absolutely hates everything about them.)

Deli and seafood out of commission temporarily behind this tarp, but we have packaged items temporarily available in front of the counter. Must be some serious changes happening here, since we've seen that store owners will do everything they can to work around an open service counter, even if it takes standing on the case.

The once-record breaking bakery had also been cut back very significantly, though I assume that's only temporary. Sadly, there were no worthwhile donuts to be found this visit.

It seems the flooring has not yet been scraped up in this portion of the store. In the grand aisle and other parts of the store, the tile had been ripped up and the concrete underneath had already been stained and polished. I assume the rest of the store will receive the same treatment.

Meats are up next on the back wall, and as we see, significantly less has changed in this part of the store. The decor and aisle markers remain from pre-renovation, and we see a mixture of new lighting (the pendants to the left) and the remaining lighting from the old drop ceiling, which I assume is permanently gone. At least I hope so. Polished concrete floor / exposed black ceiling is my favorite supermarket aesthetic. Plus, that's what's in Greenstein's other ShopRite, the Newark location, which is gorgeous, and it stands to reason that the Bloomfield ShopRite will look reasonably similar when it's done.

This is something I've never seen -- this wall was temporarily covered by plywood, and the sign had actually been removed from the wall that's covered and mounted on the plywood!

The grocery aisles give us a reasonable expectation of what the store will look like soon. I wonder whether the grocery shelves will be replaced. I assume the lighting will be, too, since right now the fixtures are just hanging since they're no longer being held by the drop ceiling.

Frozen foods in the second-to-last aisle, with an unpolished floor. Looks like this section is going to stay under a drop ceiling. I wonder why. These freezer cases seem to be all new, since the row to the left here used to be coffin cases. The frozen section has probably stayed about the same in terms of selection, but decreased in space since freezer cases also used to take up that front corner seen straight ahead. That's temporarily home to HABA while the pharmacy area is under construction, but I wonder what's going there eventually.

Some very rough flooring here in the last aisle, which again I assume will be fixed. While the dairy cases have not been replaced, the wall above them has been repainted. Again, it's hard to tell whether we're getting a sneak peek of the decor that will be going in here or if it's just a generic white temporarily.

The front end is also going to remain under a drop ceiling it seems, and it looks like the remodel at the front end is pretty much done. The store has a charming but historically questionable timeline of the history of ShopRite from this side to the other end, charting key milestones in the coop's history. A really nice feature, but it's not overly accurate. It says, for instance, that ShopRite was founded in 1951 -- which is kind of true. The Wakefern Food cooperative was formed five years earlier but the ShopRite name was introduced in 1951; members of Wakefern could then choose to "join" the ShopRite banner or remain under their own name but with the distribution of Wakefern. It also displays the pre-1976 logo alongside a 1983 event on the timeline (and I assume they did that so as not to repeat the 1976-2001 logo right next to each other). If you want more Wakefern history, everything I know about the coop, I learned in A Symphony of Soloists.

But the real historical goldmine at this store is this sign over the self-checkout area! Bringing back the slogan promoted heavily at Newark, this wall displays three different historical images of the Brookdale ShopRite. From left to right, we have the original store at 1273 Broad Street in Bloomfield, which today is a sushi restaurant, then the beginning of the construction of the 1401 Broad Street location ("watch your money-saving supermarket grow... on this spot!"), and the completion in 1962. The store was later demolished for the existing building at 1409 Broad Street in 1999. Bloomfield also had ShopRites at 112 Broughton Ave, 296 Glenwood Ave (which today is the site of the Foodtown), and 37 Carteret St -- which is a whole lot for a city that's not particularly big. It's possible, or likely even, that those other stores were owned by other families. It's also possible that at least one other was owned by the Greensteins and later consolidated with the 1273 Broad location for the 1401 Broad store in 1962.

Here's a better shot of the historical images. Anyway, that wraps up our update here at the Brookdale ShopRite, and I'll definitely return once the remodel is complete! This extensive remodel has prompted the Stop & Shop about a mile up Broad Street to do its own remodel, which you can see in progress here. Also make sure to check out the brand-new SuperFresh of Passaic here, and see what's up next here!