TOUR: The Fresh Market - Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, PA

The Fresh Market

Opened: 2016

Previous Tenants: none

Location: 8208 Germantown Ave, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, PA

Photographed: July 30, 2021

Welcome to our second Fresh Market store tour! I commented on the store execution improving in the post of the Bedminster Fresh Market, although I do think execution (as far as product mix and quality) varies greatly between the different stores. This one is another very well-done store, which was built new in 2016 on the ground floor of this complex.

The store is in the range of 25,000 square feet, and I believe takes up the entire ground floor of this new building. The whole development is very attractively designed, and intended to tie into the historic, quaint Germantown Avenue business district -- the street of which is paved with cobblestones.

Here's the entrance to the parking lot, and the supermarket's entrance faces the parking lot.

We enter and turn right to go to the back right corner of the store. Produce is on the back wall, with bakery, meat, and seafood on the left side wall. Deli, cheese, and prepared foods are in an island, with a few grocery aisles and dairy/frozen at the front of the store. It's a standard layout for The Fresh Market.

As we see, this store is very pleasant on the inside, with a large and attractive produce department up first. The lighting is great in this area, and the decor is a bit simpler and more streamlined than what we saw in the older decor package at Bedminster.

Pricing also seems to be better these days, with prices more in line with other supermarkets. When The Fresh Market was in Livingston, and when they first opened in Bedminster, the prices were way higher than anyone else (even Kings, which was and still is famously high-priced).

I also think the product selection has improved, with better quality in perishables and stronger service departments. They're still not exceptional, in my opinion, but they're more in line with most other large supermarkets, and probably generally better in perishables than, say, ACME.

Here's the deli/cheese/prepared foods island in front of the service counters on the back wall, which being with seafood and butcher...

Bakery displays separate the meat/seafood counter from the deli counter, which makes the area feel very cramped. I would've moved the bakery displays elsewhere or possibly put the deli counter on the other side of the island.

As you can see below, this seems to be an unnecessarily clunky layout.

As you can also tell from these pictures, the store was... not particularly crowded. In fact it was nearly empty. I don't know if the store is busy at other times, but it certainly was not when I visited.

The bakery department is to the left of butcher/seafood on the back wall.

And the front of the deli island has cheese and sushi. Very nice, but again, the layout of this area needs to be rethought because of the congestion behind this island.

There are maybe three or four grocery aisles, with dairy and frozen in the last one.

I do like the chalkboard category markers here. There's very little signage around the store (beyond the pictures on the walls) but these are the few places where there's actually writing.

And in the front of the grocery department is the bulk candy bar...

A limited but fairly thorough dairy and frozen department takes up the outside of the last aisle.

As we can see, though, the focus here is not on packing as much merchandise as possible (as we see in some urban stores, such as in NYC) but in having a more curated selection of higher-end items.

I like the wooden framing over the checkouts, which also seems to be standard in TFM's stores. It's a nice feature and a nice way to end our tour here! We have one more store in Philadelphia before we move on to the suburbs, and it's just a couple blocks away on Germantown Avenue. Check it out tomorrow on The Independent Edition!