TOUR: Kimberton Whole Foods - Ottsville, PA

Kimberton Whole Foods
Owner: Terry Brett

Opened: 2019

Cooperative: INFRA
Location: 4010 Durham Rd, Ottsville, PA

Photographed: July 22, 2021

Today's post is a really exciting store -- at least to me! This is our second time visiting a Kimberton Whole Foods natural market, with our first stop back in Downingtown in the Lancaster County area. That store was fine, but didn't do much for me. This 18,000 square foot, four-year-old location really blew me away, though, and a big part of that was the produce department. As we'll see, there's a lot of really unique local stuff here.

The store also features a restaurant on the side with its own entrance. For the supermarket, we enter in the middle of the storefront and turn right for produce and bulk foods on the right side wall. Meats and dairy are on the back wall, with frozen foods in the second-to-last aisle and bakery/prepared foods in the last aisle. There's a coffee shop/cafe in the front left corner, with HABA in the middle of the store.

Because the store was a recent new-build, it looks more impressive than the Downingtown location. The high vaulted ceiling is a great touch, and there's a lot of natural light in the store. But as we see here, the big plus in this location is the products. The produce department feels more like a farmer's market, and that's not just because of display and merchandising.

Floral is opposite produce, with the registers beyond that.

Here's an overview of the produce department. Note that the produce is all certified organic, and in season, much of it is local, coming from farms in the Lancaster area, just around 60 miles from the store.

The vegetables were particularly impressive to me, with greens, peppers, and other things I had never seen before, or had never seen such a beautiful specimen of.

These are mostly Pennsylvania grown items -- notice the Lancaster Co-Op tags on the greens below.

Okay, enough on the produce itself. Here we can get a good overview of the sales floor of the store, with the area jutting out in the back right home to offices and an entrance to the restaurant.

Another overview of the front end.

And on the back wall, we move into the meat and dairy departments. Many similar natural food stores don't have meat departments, so although it's small it's more substantial than I was expecting.

And the grocery aisles are pretty standard, if very pleasant with the high ceilings and natural light.

Here we can see where the grocery aisles divide and open up to the HABA department.

The HABA department is mostly natural and organic personal care items, especially vitamins and the like.

Unlike some natural food stores, this one is definitely a supermarket, not just a small specialty store.

I like the various department and category signs around the store, such as these built into wooden crates.

And the decor also serves to inform customers, with pictures of the farms they are getting products from. There is so much agriculture in this part of Pennsylvania that, in season, there's no good reason to not bring in so many local items.

Cheese and other deli-related items are in the last aisle, along with baked goods and single-serve beverages.

The lower shelving in the HABA department gives us some good opportunities to check out the whole store, and we can see how airy and bright the store feels from this angle.

Lots of local baked goods and bread items, too.

And in the front corner is sushi, smoothies, juice, and coffee along with a small seating area.

Cozy enough even though the store is pretty open and a bit impersonal.

This is certainly one of the more impressive Kimberton locations, although there are several that are brand-new and quite beautiful also.

We are nearly done with the northern Bucks - Mont area, but we have two more stops west of here. Tomorrow we're headed to Quakertown on The Market Report!