Look Inside: Mi Tierra Supermarket - Hazleton, PA

Mi Tierra Supermarket
Owner: unknown

Opened: 2017

Cooperative: America's Food Basket
Location: 304 E Diamond Ave, Hazleton, PA

Photographed: December 22, 2018

Welcome back and I hope you had a great weekend! Today we're going to be taking a look at one of the smaller supermarkets around Hazleton, of which there are several. Among many others are the Associate's Grocery & Meat Market and the Penn City Supermarket. This Mi Tierra, which appears to be loosely related to the stores in Queens, was previously the M&D Supermarket and opened in 2017 affiliated with Krasdale Foods, like the Queens stores. In 2022 or so, the store left Krasdale and joined America's Food Basket, along with the Hazleton Food Supermarket.

There's a small parking lot for the store one door down from it, and the store is actually larger than it looks at a fairly hefty 8500 square feet. Obviously that's not gigantic, but it's bigger than the little convenience store it looks like from the outside.

Produce is in front along with a tiny deli, and then we move into dairy and frozen on the left side of the store, and meat and seafood in the back. I'm not clear on whether this store has a service seafood department; at the time of my visit, there was a service counter obviously set up for seafood. There was no fish, but there was ice -- so I would assume it wasn't closed permanently, or why would they still fill it with ice?

As we can see, Mi Tierra did some renovation when they moved in, as the store is a rather old supermarket but doesn't look like it inside.

On the back wall we have packaged meats and a service butcher counter.

And in the back right corner we have this seafood department, which doesn't exactly look open but then there's ice too, so I was confused. Unfortunately, I haven't been back to this store since 2018, so I'm not sure I have the most, uh, up-to-date information.

There's also a sizeable selection of nonfoods like paper and cleaning products. Four aisles total in this store, but they're fairly long.

Here's a look at the produce department in the front, with the registers on the left side.

As we see, this is somewhere between a full supermarket and a bodega, but you can certainly pick up the grocery items you need here.

This part of Hazleton doesn't really have any other grocery stores, so this also definitely serves a need in that way. But there used to be a much larger supermarket just a few doors down Diamond Ave. Head over to Grocery Archaeology tomorrow to check it out!