46 Tolland Green, Tolland, CT

Original Grocery Tenant: Red & White Food Stores

Address: 46 Tolland Green, Tolland, CT

Opened: unknown

Closed: unknown

Later Tenants: Tolland Red & White Gift Shop

Photographed: November 27, 2022

The small town of Tolland, CT -- 18 miles northeast of Hartford and 12 miles south of Massachusetts -- today has a very attractive-looking Big Y, but once was served by the Tolland Red & White. Red & White, for those who are not familiar, is a very loose group of small independent grocers, once a larger cooperative with locations across the US and Canada but now really just a brand distributed by The Federated Group from the Chicago area. It's not uncommon to see small convenience stores, bodegas, and greengrocers in the New York City area selling Red & White products, but those come from Federated via the Jetro wholesaler in New York, through their FoodBase program.

On the town green in Tolland, a roughly 1000 square foot store retains the name and its original sign (as far as I can tell) but today, the Red & White is a gift shop, not a grocer. You can read about the store's history on their website here. It's not the first time we've seen a Red & White become a gift shop.

Now we're starting to feel like we're in New England!

And we're almost done with Connecticut, too. We have one more town to visit before we move east to Rhode Island, though, and let's start with the first of two stores there tomorrow on The Independent Edition!