America's Food Basket
Owner: Edwin Polanco
Opened: 2016
Previous Tenants: Associated Supermarkets
Cooperative: America's Food Basket
Location: 4 May St, Main South, Worcester, MA
Photographed: November 10, 2018; November 1, 2019; and May 23, 2021
America's Food Basket is a cooperative of supermarkets across the East Coast. They represent stores under the AFB and Ideal Food Basket names, as well as a few others, all the way from Boston to Atlanta, with AFB stores in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and Georgia, and Ideal stores in New York and Pennsylvania. Most of these stores are full supermarkets,
even if they're on the smaller side. But the Worcester location (which we've
seen before) is the smallest, occupying just 4,000 square feet in a
former auto garage that later became
Super Then Supermarket in 2013 and then
Associated by 2015 before finally becoming AFB by 2017. (Don't ask me what Super Then means, I don't know.)
The big exciting change in this store is that in 2019, the temporary America's Food Basket banner was removed (see above) and replaced by a permanent America's Food Basket sign that looked exactly like the banner (see the first picture). The inside is pretty much the same as when it opened, and it looks like a lot of the fixtures were secondhand when Super Then opened.
It's obviously a hodgepodge of several rooms, since it wasn't designed to be a supermarket. On the far right side, you have produce, meat, and a small deli. On the left side, you have maybe four aisles, dairy/frozen, and a register or two.
As you can see, this is definitely somewhere between a bodega and a supermarket. We have several more AFB locations to see, and they're all larger and more supermarket-y than this one. (Or, as an example, compare this to
Springfield.) But this is a good segue into tomorrow's post, where we'll take a look at a few of the independent grocery stores around the Webster Square and Main South area we haven't seen yet!
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