TOUR: Foodtown - Red Bank, NJ

Foodtown of Red Bank

Owner: Lou Scaduto Jr. / Circus Fresh Foods

Opened: 1977

Previous Tenants: Safeway (1950s-ca. 1965) > Finast (ca. 1965-1977)

Cooperative: Allegiance Retail Services

Location: 362 Broad St

Photographed: December 2020

We're here to tour Red Bank's main supermarket in the downtown area, which is a Circus Fresh Foods (formerly Food Circus)-owned Foodtown! The 40,000 square foot store is built around what appears to be an arched-roof Safeway, though I don't believe it was a Marina style store. The Safeway, per JoshAustin610, later became a Finast until Food Circus moved into the space in 1977, replacing an older store just around the corner -- which has, like Middletown, since become a liquor store owned by Circus. This is one of the larger Foodtown locations, though Circus's Ocean location was over 70,000 square feet -- far and away the largest Foodtown -- before being downsized to about 50,000 square feet, still the largest.

Though I don't know for sure, it seems like the extensive exterior remodels and expansions were done by Circus, not a prior tenant. In 2018, the store held its grand reopening with a brand-new decor package I haven't seen in any other store. It looks great, as we'll see, and for more details on the renovation you can see the Asbury Park Press. We enter in the front left corner to produce on the left side of the first aisle with natural foods, bulk foods, and soup/sandwich counter on the right side. Meat lines the left half of the back wall with a "grand aisle"-type setup in the right half featuring seafood, bakery, deli, cheese, and prepared foods. Frozen is in the second-to-last aisle with dairy at the end. In addition to the liquor store in the old Foodtown around the corner, there's a small liquor section inside the store.

As we can see, Circus goes for the higher-end positioning, with a large emphasis on natural and organic. Great lighting throughout the store, too.

Natural foods take up maybe two short aisles in the front of the produce aisle as well. I love the flooring! By the way, those "Nature's Harvest" signs are left over from the previous decor package, which you can see here.

On the front wall just next to the entrance is this gluten free department, a very nice touch to correlate to the natural foods department facing. Great decor! While this obviously was previously the customer service counter, I'm unfortunately blanking on where the counter has been moved to.

Here we see bulk foods and the soup/sandwich counter.

Awesome decor on the big wall here. As we'll see, the decor is scaled down a little for some of the other departments.

Butcher on the back wall, with the rest of packaged meats lining both sides of the back aisle. Some excellent decor-merchandising integration here with matching category markers and so on. We can also get a good sense that this store does a big business, probably because of its location.

Moving into the grocery aisles, we see an interesting blend of higher-end appearance and selections with aggressive value-based promotions. I do wonder to what extent that is impactful, since Foodtown has and has long had a reputation of being higher-price.

Once again, great flooring -- we can see that the lighting and shelving is older but refurbished.

An overview of the service departments in the back corner of the store, which really feels like a separate store since it's a little isolated from the rest of the sales floor (by design, of course). Seafood is first along the back wall, with an impressive selection of local items -- we are at the Jersey Shore, after all...

Bakery is just to the right, and we can see that the new decor appears to have been placed on the framing of the old decor -- for a quite attractive effect, by the way.

I didn't actually buy anything at this bakery, but I can tell you Circus's bakeries in their other stores are quite good. Kitchen (hot foods) is the last department on the back wall, with deli on the side wall...

Clearly deli is a very important department here. I'm assuming these strong points around the store are mostly reinforced by the competition of the nearby Saker ShopRites, which have excellent perishables.

Brand new freezer cases and a beautiful new floor welcome us to the spotless frozen foods aisle. In the dairy aisle, the last aisle of the store, local photographs come into the store in the way Quality Built incorporates them in the latest ACMEs.

The store comes out a bit dark in these pictures, especially here, but I do think it's much brighter in person.

A small but packed-with-merchandise liquor department takes up the front corner opposite the entrance.

A look across the (pretty busy, at the time) front-end. Lots of registers open though, and again I love the flooring and lighting. We're going to head a little to the west, just across the Parkway, for tomorrow's store tour right here on The Market Report!