Special Report: Garden Fresh Market - Spring Valley, NY

Garden Fresh Market

Opened: October 23, 2024

Owner: Wilson Bermeo

Previous Tenants: CVS

Cooperative: Key Food Stores

Location: 274 Old Nyack Tpk, Spring Valley, NY

Photographed: October 25, 2024

How many supermarkets have we seen that have made their home in former drugstores? Ten or twenty years ago, it would've been the other way around -- lots of drugstores that had opened in former supermarkets. Now, the trend has flipped, as more drugstores close and independent supermarkets pop up around the area in former supermarkets.

Spring Valley, New York is a city of around 35,000 (okay, it's actually a village within the town of Ramapo) right on the New York/New Jersey border in Rockland County, about seven miles west of the Mario Cuomo bridge, formerly the Tappan Zee. In an area of Rockland County with a large Orthodox Jewish population, parts of Spring Valley are home to large Latin, Caribbean, and African immigrant communities. Two miles north of the New Jersey state line, Garden Fresh Market has made its home in a closed CVS of just 9000 square feet. It held a soft opening on October 23 and a grand opening on October 25, when I visited.

While the outside looks a lot like a former CVS, the inside is all but unrecognizable. The store feels much larger than its diminutive size, and we enter to a spacious produce department with a hot food and salad bar at the back (I don't believe this store has a deli, but there are prepared foods). Beer and dairy line the rest of the back wall, with frozen foods in roughly the middle of the store. The rest of the dairy department, a wall of values, and the packaged meat department are in the last aisle on the left side. Service meat and seafood departments are on the front wall to the far left of the store, with baked goods next to the seafood department.

We can see the store wasn't fully set up just yet, with some small areas still empty such as the lower part of this produce shelving. But by and large, the supermarket was ready to go.

And it sure doesn't look like a former drugstore. The renovation here was very extensive, and the store looks new. For some context, this is an independent store, a member of the Key Food cooperative that can't seem to stop growing. (A new Key Food opened in Manchester, CT, near Hartford on Wednesday, and hopefully we'll see that soon.) It's owned by Wilson Bermeo, who also owns another store in town called the Spring Valley Supermarket (formerly Compare Foods), along with the Huerto del Eden Supermarket here in Spring Valley and the relatively new Nyack Fresh Market in Nyack a couple miles east.

Beer and dairy lining the back wall of the store.

Notice the high shelving that maximizes the small space they have.

Freezer cases look like they might be secondhand, but they look to be in good shape.

The grocery aisles are packed with selection, including all the basics and a general slant towards Latin American foods.

Both Huerto del Eden, which means Garden of Eden in Spanish, and Spring Valley Supermarket are very small stores, although Nyack Fresh Market is slightly larger.

Still, this store feels much more extensive than just 9000 square feet inside. Although it feels small, it feels expansive.

Packaged meats and cold cuts in the front of the last aisle.

Looking towards the back wall...

And service meat and seafood counters are on the front wall. The registers are on the other side of the wall you can see straight ahead below, and the space behind that wall seems to be used for various backrooms and offices. Baked goods line the outside of the bump-out.

The overall appearance of the store is very simple, with an understated polished concrete floor, dark ceiling and fixtures, and white and gray walls with bold black lettering. But I think it serves the store well; a more complicated design might make it feel overly complicated in such a small store. And even though it's small, each department looked well thought-out, especially this really nice seafood counter.

A ridiculous amount of fresh bread and pastries was piled in the bakery cases around the corner from the seafood department, brought in from Texeira's Bakery in Newark and maybe one or two other area bakeries.  So even though there's no in-store bakery here, there's still plenty of fresh baked goods to go around.

And refrigerated baked goods face the produce department between the front-end and seafood/meat.

And as we circle back to the front-end, we see that the registers are opposite the produce department. You can get a sense of how shallow the building is here -- the distance to the back of the store from the front wall is minimal.

And a look at the front-end, which feels more like Bermeo's other stores than a CVS...

This tiny store is an impressive reuse of a former CVS, and I'm glad to see more independent supermarkets! Don't miss today's other posts...

• Amazon Fresh's new store in Lodi, NJ
• A new gourmet market near Hudson Yards in Manhattan
• A CVS-turned-supermarket right on the NJ/NY border (this post)

Plus a preview of what we'll see tomorrow...

• Ongoing work at two different Food Bazaars
• Renovations finished at the ACME in Saddle Brook and the ShopRite in Rochelle Park
• The end appears to be near for South Orange's gourmet market