TOUR: Garden Farm Market - Morrisville, PA

Garden Farm Market

Owner: Ki Chung

Opened: 2001

Cooperative: none

Location: 1 E Trenton Ave, Morrisville, PA

Photographed: January 6, 2020

Ah, the Garden Farm Market of Morrisville! This is well-known among the ACME fan community as a former pitched-roof ACME with its signage inside completely intact. Acme Style covered this store, but of course we can't get to that post anymore. Here's what the exterior used to look like. We're familiar with the Garden Farm Market chain from their New Jersey stores, which include Metuchen, North Brunswick, and Newark. With GFM's new signage here, the exterior looks pretty sharp, especially during the day.

I assume GFM gutted the former ACME when they moved in, which was about six years after the ACME left (they moved down the street in 1995). GFM opened in 2001 and, 21 years later, seems to still be going strong. The deli lines the left side wall of the store, seen above, with some international grocery items and dairy on the same side. The majority of the sales floor of the 13,000 square foot store is dedicated to produce, with frozen foods and the rest of grocery on the right side of the store.

And the ACME signage inside is still hanging! The panels (starting in the top left, then alternating up and down) read A C M E in beautiful mid-century modern stylized lettering.

GFM's big draw here is produce and seafood, which takes up the entire back wall of the store. The signage is not exactly elegant here, but it does the job. It seems they focus on quantity and price, not exactly in-store experience.

I assume the lighting was redone at some point after ACME left, as was the flooring -- although I could be wrong about that, given that the flooring seen here doesn't seem to have been installed intentionally in that arrangement. The brown smaller tiles look like non-slip tiles used for behind service counters or in backrooms, so maybe the flooring was not updated when GFM moved in. Anybody recognize the rest of the store's flooring as ACME flooring?

Here we can see refrigerated vegetables in the last aisle. The freezer cases are here too, and between them and the rest of produce are a few grocery aisles. Based on a few pictures on Google Maps, it looks like the store has actually been pretty significantly redone since I visited. It looks like produce is now all on the left side of the store, being expanded into the area previously used for baked goods and international grocery in the front left corner. Produce now goes right up to the deli counter, and grocery is in a much larger part of the sales floor in the middle of the sales floor. It looks from those pictures like there's a larger selection of international groceries now, and also a larger selection of general grocery overall.

One more shot looking towards the back of the store. I do love these pitched-roof stores! Oh, and by the way, to place ourselves, we're right across the river from Trenton -- a mile and a half west of the Trenton Food Bazaar and a mile and a quarter southwest of the Trenton Super Food. But from here we move west to Fairless Hills tomorrow for a store on Grocery Archaeology!