TOUR: Foodtown - East Stroudsburg, PA

Super Foodtown of East Stroudsburg

Owner: Debbie & Jack Mignosi

Opened: 1988

Previous Tenants: unknown

Cooperative: Allegiance Retail Services

Location: 232 Fox Run Ln, East Stroudsburg, PA

Photographed: January 15, 2021 and May 28, 2021

It's been a while since we've seen a Foodtown! This is the last Foodtown left in Pennsylvania, although there used to be maybe half a dozen. The 36,000 square foot store was built in 1988 and later renovated and expanded at least once. It also appears that it was opened as a Mignosi's IGA and later converted to Foodtown.

Inside, we can definitely get the sense that the store was expanded, but it's a very pleasant supermarket that I enjoyed shopping at quite a bit when I was staying for a long weekend near Bushkill.

We enter to produce and bakery on the front wall, shown here. At the back of the first few grocery aisles is deli and seafood, with meats and dairy on the back wall. A beer cafe is now located in the front left corner of the store.

I personally thought that this store had quite the good bakery, which is an important qualification for me. As we get into the grocery aisles, we start with beverages in the first aisle. It's a little odd to not see a perishable department in the first aisle, but this store isn't set up with a grand aisle. Instead, the perishables and service departments are all around the perimeter.

As we'll see, the store is spotless and very well-run.

Here's the deli and seafood area in the back of the first few grocery aisles. The original pictures are from January 2021 and I returned in May of that year to find that the seafood department had received some new signage and promotional posters, but no other changes happened to the rest of the store. I wonder why bother redoing just seafood, although it looks good.

Meat and the butcher counter are along the rest of the back wall. Again, we can tell the flooring is on the slightly older side, but it's in excellent shape.

It seems that maintenance here has been excellent.

The store is wide and shallow, so the grocery aisles are pretty short.

Worth noting that this is Mignosi's Super Foodtown, and the Mignosis previously owned a few stores on Staten Island. One is now Olive Tree Marketplace, and another was sold last year and is now an Ideal Food Basket. (The Mignosis had sold those businesses long ago, but both continued to carry the Mignosi's name until 2015 and 2022, respectively.

We can see there are some older and some newer cases in the frozen food department...

The store has 21 aisles total, which isn't a whole lot but is a lot in a store that's only 36,000 square feet. That illustrates how short each aisle is.

Dairy begins on the back wall and continues down the outside of the last aisle.

This decor package was also used in other parts of Pennsylvania by Thomas' Family Markets, another Foodtown operator. They've slowly been closing and selling stores until they finally went out of business last year. I'm not sure if the decor sharing is intentional or if it just happens to be the same design firm. I haven't seen this decor in any other stores.

The last few aisles are located in the expansion.

Notice that the Mignosi name is fairly prominent in this store, as compared to Foodtown. There must be a lot of recognition of that name locally.

And a look across the front end before we head out! In this picture we're looking from the produce side of the store over towards dairy/beer on the far left side. This store appears to do rather well despite the presence of a fairly new competitor just about two miles away, towards Stroudsburg on route 209. That's where we're headed tomorrow!