TOUR: Asian Supermarket - Worcester, MA

Asian Supermarket

Owner: Lan Heung Ha

Opened: 2017

Cooperative: none

Location: 50 Mill St, Webster Square, Worcester, MA

Photographed: August 28, 2018; September 19, 2018; and September 3, 2021

It's not uncommon to see an Asian supermarket set up shop in a former big-chain supermarket location -- and this building was a Stop & Shop -- but what's interesting is that Stop & Shop closed long before Asian Supermarket opened, and there was at least one other tenant in between. In this case, it was a thrift store, meaning that Asian Supermarket had to completely re-outfit the roughly 21,000 square foot space when they opened.

Here we can see the clear original Stop & Shop building, and how Asian Supermarket takes up the left portion of the arched roof building along with the expansion out the left side. Savers, the thrift store previously occupying this space (which also occupies several other former supermarkets in the area), closed up shop around 2015, and Asian Supermarket opened in 2017.

The Asian Supermarket storefront is tucked way in the back corner of the mall, making it rather difficult to see from Park Avenue, the main thoroughfare through the area. Still, the store appears to do well because it's the only larger-scale Asian supermarket in Worcester and its immediate surroundings, and there's a significant Vietnamese community in Main South and towards Webster Square. There are other Asian markets and smaller supermarkets we'll be seeing in this area, too. Plus, there's a community of international students from China, Vietnam, and other Eastern Asian countries at Clark University, which is essentially a couple blocks away.

So enough background, let's tour this supermarket!

We enter roughly in the middle of the storefront and turn right to walk along the front wall into the produce department. Refrigerated produce and dairy line the right side wall of the store, with some frozen items there. Dairy, housewares, and an area that appears to have previously been a prepared foods counter line the back wall, with the rest of frozen foods, meat, and seafood on the far-left side of the store. In a setup common for Asian supermarkets in the northeast US (not sure about elsewhere in the country), the front half or so of the supermarket is taken up by long rows of produce shelves, and the grocery aisles are in the back half.

Here's a look down the first aisle, which has refrigerated and frozen foods. Unfortunately, the arched ceiling isn't exposed here.

Some kitchenwares are in the first two aisles, too.

There's an alcove in the back that appears to have previously been backroom space when Stop & Shop was here that now has utensils on the side wall, and refrigerated beverages lining the outside with large case items in the middle. I assume these are primarily sold to owners of small stores or restaurants.

After an aisle of snacks on the far-right side of the store, we move into dry produce taking up the front half of the supermarket. Notice here that, although the curved ceiling isn't exposed, we can see clear evidence of it with the slanted drop ceiling and the curved beams or posts visible towards the right.

And looking across the front of the store towards the seafood counter on the other side.

As I mentioned, the grocery aisles are in the back half of the store.

They're tight but well-appointed, and while the store appears to focus on Chinese foods, you can also find items from Vietnamese cuisine and some other assorted Eastern Asian countries.

The arched posts are present in the grocery aisles, too, including this... uh, questionable choice.

Here's a look across the rows of produce tables towards the front-left corner of the store.

Over on the back wall, we can see it's kind of a mix of a few things, and the stools and other plastic items in the middle there are pushed in front of what appears to have been a prepared foods counter.

In the last aisle, expansive meat and seafood service counters line the outside wall, with freezers selling packaged items opposite.

This is a very large selection, and obviously much bigger than any other Asian market in the immediate area.

In fact, this felt a lot like a lot of the Chinese supermarkets I've been to in the New York metro area. (Korean supermarkets tend to be set up a little differently.)

And here's the front-end, with only a few registers and a customer service-type counter lining the front wall.

Main South and then the southern part of downtown Worcester have the city's largest Asian population, I believe, so we'll see a few other Asian grocers (mostly Vietnamese) as we travel through. But the Webster Square/Main South area is a very diverse neighborhood, which also has notable Albanian, Black, and Dominican populations. Tomorrow we're headed to a supermarket on Main Street that serves the Dominican community!