Look Inside: Community Natural Food Store - New Holland, PA

Community Natural Food Store

Owner: Annamarie Burkholder

Opened: ca. 2011 in this location

Cooperative: none
Location: 128 E Main St, New Holland, PA

Photographed: August 20, 2019

Just next door from yesterday's Save-Mor Groceries is today's Community Natural Food Store. As I mentioned on that post, these two used to share a building on Railroad Avenue, until around 2011 this store moved to this current building, which as far as I can tell was purpose-built for this store. Save-Mor, in turn, moved out of the Railroad Avenue storefront to the neighboring one here in 2015. I guess these two can't be apart for too long.

The selection here is rather different from what we might expect in other natural food stores. Prominent in the front of the 7500 square foot storefront are bulk foods and natural HABA/home goods. I might expect to have produce or some other perishable like that in the front, but the perishables are actually all at the back of the store in a separate room, as we'll see.

There are several grocery aisles which run front to back, but the majority of the shelf space is dedicated to health and beauty items. Again, not exactly what I was expecting -- nothing wrong with it, but just a surprise.

As we can see here, there's a large area for vitamins and similar items.

But there's also natural and organic pantry staples and snacks, albeit in a smaller selection than I was expecting.

In the back of the store, we enter a separate room (equipped with refrigeration) for produce and a few other perishable items, with frozen/dairy items on the outside walls of this space.

By the way, it seemed to me that -- like many of the other grocery stores in this area -- this natural food store was owned by a member of the Amish community, something we see a lot in rural Lancaster County but which we won't see within the city of Lancaster at all.

Speaking of the city of Lancaster, that's where we're headed next! New Holland is about 12 miles outside of the city center of Lancaster -- a larger city than people realize sometimes (about 60,000 -- or a larger population than Harrisburg, the state's capital). Our first Lancaster city stop is on the eastern edge of the city and will be over on The Market Report on Monday!