TOUR: Supremo Food Market - Frankford, Philadelphia, PA

Supremo Food Market
Owner: Eddie Trujillo

Opened: 2020

Previous Tenants: ACME Markets (late 70s/early 80s - 2002) > Supreme Food Market (2005-2020)

Cooperative: none

Location: 900 Orthodox St, Frankford, Philadelphia, PA

Photographed: July 2021

By now, we're pretty well-versed in Supremo -- we've seen 13 of their 14 stores. And here's the 14th! This store of roughly 36,000 square feet was constructed in the late 1970s or early 1980s as an ACME according to JoshAustin610, then closed in 2002. The space remained vacant until Supreme Food Market opened around 2005-06, later converting to Supremo around 2020.

The ACME facade is still very much intact, but looking good with a fresh repaint. The former Kmart next door is today a National Wholesale Liquidators, complete with a full fleet of Pathmark carts...

Let's head into the Supremo and take a tour. We'll be very familiar with the way this store looks by now, having previously had the same decor package as Pennsauken and with the same refresh we've seen at Walnut and others.

We enter in the front left corner of the store to produce, with meats on the right side of the first aisle and refrigerated produce on the left. Service meat and seafood are at the end of the first aisle, with dairy continuing along the back wall. Frozen foods are in the last aisle and deli/bakery is in the front right corner.

As we'll see, this store still has a few ACME remnants around (and a Best Market cart...?), but Supremo pretty much turned it into one of their standard stores when they opened.

Here's a look at customer service (which also functions as the HABA department) at the front of the first aisle. You can see the entrance behind it to the right, and the exit to the left.

I'm assuming this store had, as an ACME, approximately the 33M format that Acme Style has talked about. In other words, ACME's produce was probably right here, with deli where the butcher is now, meat where dairy is now, frozen in the second-to-last aisle, dairy in the last aisle, and bakery where deli/bakery both are now.

This store got a very attractive version of the decor refresh, with a metallic finish on the lettering. I don't believe all the stores got that version. I also believe all of the fixtures here were painted -- not replaced, like Walnut, but still looking good.

Here's a look at the meat department in the back of the store, with these two islands plus the right side of the back of the first aisle filled with packaged meats. The service counter is just behind the islands above.

Looking back up towards the front of the store.

An interesting find here in the meat department is Urban Meadow branded chicken (that's the Key Food storebrand). I assume it's a result of the fact that UNFI supplies both Key Food and Supremo, and that nobody really cared that it's the wrong brand.

Looks like the service meat and seafood cases may have been replaced recently. They look very new.

And here's seafood. Unfortunately, this decor package is not the most exciting, and doesn't so much work here with the two-tiered ceilings.

One final shot of the first aisle, with cold cuts and (strangely enough) eggs in the meat department.

Here's where the lower ceiling over the produce department ends, as we move into the grocery aisles.

Note that Supremo didn't replace the aisle markers here when the store was refreshed, but they actually went to the trouble to replace the Supreme logos with these newer Supremo decals.

We again see a pristine center store with beautiful new flooring. I'm assuming ACME's shelving didn't have lights in it, as we see here. Hard to tell how much exactly is left over from ACME, but aside from possibly some refrigerators and maybe the freezers in the last aisle, it looks like not much.

Anybody know more about what the ACME was like when it closed? How was it laid out? What decor package did it have?

Once you get out of the first aisle, the ceilings in this store are very pleasantly high.

Candy and soda aisle. Notice that the lights in the ceiling don't exactly match up with where Supremo has their aisles these days, so it's possible ACME had a slightly different aisle arrangement (or maybe fewer aisles that were wider...?) that fit more appropriately under the lights.

We are missing the I in Fresh Dairy here, leaving us with only dary. In addition to a new I, I'd like to see a little more stock in the dairy department, which was a little empty when I visited. The rest of the store looked good.

And here it is folks, the famous rounded soffit corner from the 1970s/80s ACMEs! Acme Style has extensively discussed this, and we've seen it ourselves. In fact, Westmont is probably a very good representation of what this store was when it was an ACME. You can tell its bones are almost identical, although it's a mirror image of how this store is set up, and it's almost exactly the same size.

Here's a look down the frozen foods aisle. The cases on the right here look newer than those on the left, but I'm not convinced they're not both left over from ACME. If either side is, it's the left side. It's also fully possible Supremo brought in secondhand cases when they opened.

Ice cream gives way to bakery in the front corner, with the deli next to that. I don't know if ACME had an in-store bakery here, but Supremo does not.

Here's the deli. Again, these cases look either new or newly repainted, but I doubt they're left over from ACME. Is the tile on the back wall?

And now for a look across the front-end. There's some dead space here where I assume ACME had more registers but has now become packaged baked goods and large bags of rice.

Front end looking back towards deli/bakery, and into the grocery aisles...

That wraps up our look at this Supremo, which is also the last Supremo we had yet to see! (Until they open a new store, I suppose. They haven't been doing much lately, which makes me wonder about their future. I believe I've mentioned that before.) That's all for this group of neighborhoods, but we're not going far for our next group. Come back tomorrow to see what's next!