TOUR: ShopRite - Wissinoming, Philadelphia, PA

ShopRite of Bridge & Harbison
Owner: Peter Ammons

Opened: 2018

Previous Tenants: none

Cooperative: Wakefern Food Corp.

Location: 5597 Tulip St, Wissinoming, Philadelphia, PA

Photographed: July 2021

Hello everybody, hope you had a great weekend! We are here in the southeastern part of Frankford, or what might be considered Wissinoming, just a block in from I-95 to tour what I believe is Philadelphia's newest ShopRite. (GIANT, LIDL, and ALDI are currently the big movers and shakers as far as building and opening new stores, while ShopRite/Fresh Grocer, ACME, and the others are fairly stagnant at the moment.) The Ammons family opened this roughly 80,000 square foot new-build ShopRite on a former industrial site in 2018. And I'm all for supporting small family businesses and mom and pop shops, but this neighborhood truly didn't have any supermarket at all prior to the ShopRite's opening. The other options include the famous Frankford Holiday Thriftway (closed 2016) a mile northwest, the Mayfair Shop n Bag (closed 2017, now Hung Vuong Food Market) a mile and a quarter northeast, and the ShopRite of Knorr St one and 3/4 miles northeast.

Well, this ShopRite is presumably filling a need in this neighborhood, but when I visited in the late afternoon on a July Friday, it was absolutely deserted. Which is a shame, if that's how it normally is, because this is a gorgeous store. Let's head inside.

We enter to the grand aisle, or the Fresh Food Alley as it's branded here. Produce lines the right side of the grand aisle, with a cafe, Asian food bar, grill, pizza, deli, and bakery on the left side. Seafood and meat are on the back wall, pharmacy is in an island in the first aisle, and dairy/frozen is at the right side of the store.

Here's a look at the cafe in the front corner.

Quite a robust prepared foods program here, with several stations along the left wall of the grand aisle (and what I believe is or was a catering counter visible here in the front).

And of course, self-service prepared foods bars line the grand aisle. The decor, which is very nice and bright -- not to mention with a sense of fun and humor -- comes to us courtesy of Denville, NJ-based Broden Design.

Looking over to the produce department. I assume this store does pretty well because it was packed with perishables, and they wouldn't be that fully stocked on the fresh items if it never got crowded. I guess I just came at an off-peak time.

Deli and bakery are up next in the back left corner. I'm a big fan of the big, brightly lit decor here, and the kind of rustic/industrial textures used throughout the grand aisle. I also appreciate the high open ceiling, polished concrete floor, and black fixtures.

As a quick aside, I bought a cinnamon roll and an apple fritter from the bakery here. They were both incredible. Top three I've ever had for both of them. (One of my other best apple fritters ever was from  a Wawa in Center City Philly, probably more than 10 years ago, but I never forgot how that tasted.) Any other recommendations for apple fritters or cinnamon rolls?

Great signage throughout the store! I love the reproduction neon.

Up next on the back wall is the seafood department. We can see that this decor is similar to, but much more deluxe than, what Inserra is putting in its new stores, also designed by Broden.

Here in the HABA department, we notice this store is lacking the lit HABA shelving we saw in Wayne, linked above. We do, however, have a dietitian and a pharmacy department in this area. Below you can also see customer service on the front wall.

As we head into the grocery aisles, they are (in my opinion) quite beautiful. I really like the polished concrete, black shelving, and high open ceiling look.

The Northeast Philly Butcher is up next on the back wall, with dairy visible in the yellow section at the far end. This store certainly feels every bit as large as its 78,000 square feet.

A lot of the Broden-designed ShopRites feel and look very similar, such as the Inserra stores linked above, or Bloomfield.

Aisle 12 of course, and we see ShopRite taking a tip from urban operators like SuperFresh and Food Bazaar with a Wall of Values, although sadly there are no impressive can towers.

I love the fact that all the fixtures are brand new, and that they all match. Looks so much better than the haphazard here and there approach so many stores take (although I certainly understand why).

Half an aisle of frozen to begin with, then the next aisle is frozen on both sides...

And dairy lines the outside of the last aisle with bread facing. It's a very familiar layout to me, because the Village ShopRite stores I grew up with had this exact layout (due, of course, to the fact that they were designed by Broden).

More dairy in an alcove in the front.

Here's a look at the freezer aisles from that front alcove...

You can get a sense of the store's size but also how empty it was, and even more so on the front end...

An absolutely gorgeous, practically brand-new supermarket. I hope it's doing well these days! I mentioned that there's really not any major supermarkets in this area, so it'll be a few more days before we see another store tour. Up next, we're headed to the northeastern part of Mayfair, so that we can move through Mayfair and Frankford from northeast to southwest over our next few weeks. Tomorrow, we'll be checking out a former supermarket in northeastern Mayfair on Grocery Archaeology!