TOUR: Wegmans - Northborough, MA

Wegmans
Opened: 2011

Owner: Wegman family

Previous Tenants: none

Cooperative: none

Location: 9102 Shops Dr, Northborough, MA

Photographed: October 23, 2021

Welcome to the Northborough Wegmans, which is the first Massachusetts Wegmans that we'll be touring. Coincidentally, it's also the first Wegmans to have opened in Massachusetts, as a new-build location in 2011. The store clocks in at a massive nearly 140,000 square feet, although that's roughly the size of most Wegmans of this era. It's a fairly standard Wegmans, an outpost of a chain with a generally rigid formula for its stores (although, of course, more than a few locations depart from that formula).

We enter to the grand aisle. Produce is straight ahead, with prepared foods and deli/bakery in their own section to the right along with the cafe; meat and seafood are in the back right corner of the store with floral and cheese at the back of the grand aisle; pharmacy and HABA are in the first few aisles; dairy is on the back wall with frozen foods in the middle. A liquor store is on the far left side of the store.

It's a familiar interior look, which we've seen variations on plenty of times before.

This location has The Buzz, a coffee shop immediately inside the entrance.

The rest of the seating is in the front right corner. No second floor here.

And looking down the right-side aisle with bakery, deli, and prepared foods.

Wegmans reduced their ready-to-eat prepared foods selections around the coronavirus (although it seemed that was a trend beginning before the pandemic forced the closure of in-store seating). So a lot of the previously hot or self-serve options like this Asian food bar were switched to cold packaged items for eating at home.

Looking across the front wall of the grand aisle...

Here's the catering area and the Market Cafe's separate entrance.

"Chef's Creations" also seems to be something that used to be a service counter but is now all packaged prepared foods, although I'm not positive about that. The sushi island is quite substantial and seemed busy.

Here's a look down the right side of the grand aisle, with prepared foods and seafood on this side.

Bakery and deli are opposite.

I think Wegmans has figured out the seafood department, though, with a really pleasant format. It's a nice balance between specialty service-counter items and regular grab-and-go packaged things.

A small butcher counter and the packaged meat department is behind the seafood department. Incidentally, I really like the concrete floor here -- it was poured for this store's opening, of course, and so it's in excellent shape.

Through the arches is the rest of the grand aisle, including produce, cheese, and floral.

Here, floral is a service counter on the outside wall between meat and dairy, not an island, which is what I'm more used to seeing. As we can see here, Wegmans tends to keep the decor outside of the grand aisle pretty minimal, but I don't mind it. The stores are so busy overall (both literally, with crowds of people, and figuratively, with countless sights, sounds, and smells all around) that they've probably decided to keep it simpler.

Pharmacy in an island in the first aisles.

The first few aisles after HABA are natural foods, which have their own refrigerator and freezer section as you can see here.

Natural HABA and sale items behind frozen...

Frozen foods going right up the middle of the store.

And dairy continues on the rest of the back wall.

This store has a large liquor store on the far left side of the supermarket.

And exiting that area, we go back into the nonfoods area with paper goods on the left.

And the front-end...

That brings us to the end of this Wegmans! Just east on route 9, though, another big-chain supermarket had a store until recently, and soon there'll be a new chain supermarket there -- our Monday stop. And fair warning: this weekend is going to be ABSOLUTELY PACKED with posts, too. Don't miss 'em!