TOUR: Vine Farmers Market - Hazleton, PA

Vine Farmers Market
Owner: Jose Suentos

Opened: 2013

Cooperative: none
Location: 930 N Vine St, Hazleton, PA

Photographed: December 22, 2018

Hazleton has a lot of independent Hispanic-focused grocers, but most are pretty small. Maybe that's why the Vine Farmers Market in northern Hazleton advertises itself as The Big Market. Vine Farmers Market takes up the basement of what likely was originally an industrial building at North Vine and 20th Streets.

The focus here is produce, but there's also a butcher shop, seafood, and plenty of groceries.

When we're inside, although the store is pretty large at somewhere around 15,000 square feet (compared to the other smaller Latin American stores in town), you can definitely tell you're in a basement.

There are a few grocery aisles, plus a butcher shop/seafood counter as seen below, and then in the back we have a pretty large produce department including a walk-in refrigerator room for refrigerated produce and wholesale, which this store also does.

It looks like this store may do a fair amount of wholesale business, possibly even to some of the smaller bodegas and grocers in town, or small restaurants and the like. Even in the dairy department, we see large cases of eggs alongside the typical dozen cartons.

There are definitely grocery items here, but I'm not sure I would say this is a full supermarket. It's definitely an unusual store, although not bad at all.

And the focus, of course, is on the Latin American foods.

Heading to the back of the store, we see the produce department, along with the walk-in.

Vegetables are displayed out on shelves and in styrofoam cases instead of the typical refrigerators we see.

And you can also see the cases of refrigerated items for sale here too.

And they also had some enormous carrots, with my father's (normal-sized) hand for scale. That's quite the carrot!

That wraps up our look at Vine Farmers Market. It's certainly a unique store, but it seems to serve its customers well and has an interesting selection of items you can't necessarily find in one place elsewhere in the city. I'm glad I got to check it out! We're now going to move on Monday about half a mile north to check out a much more mainstream supermarket to the north of the city within Hazle Township on The Market Report!