TOUR: Hannaford - Chelmsford, MA

Hannaford

Opened: 1990

Owner: Ahold Delhaize

Previous Tenants: Alexander's Supermarket (closed 1990)

Cooperative: none

Location: 66 Drum Hill Rd, Chelmsford, MA

Photographed: July 3, 2024

Hannaford is a pretty significant regional chain, but they're not all that big. Based in Scarborough, ME, Hannaford owns just under 200 supermarkets in ME, VT, NH, MA, and NY. Of course, they're a division of the much-larger Ahold Delhaize conglomerate. But here in Massachusetts, they have only 16 locations. They previously had more, but sold a handful in the 2016 Ahold Delhaize merger. When Stop & Shop and Hannaford overlapped, Hannaford stores were sold and S&S locations were kept. I have to wonder if, given all that Stop & Shop has struggled with lately, Ahold Delhaize wishes they'd kept the Hannaford stores instead. But here in Chelmsford, both a Hannaford and a Stop & Shop operate (separated by a mile and a half, and a Market Basket).

The roughly 60,000 square foot Chelmsford Hannaford was constructed around the 1950s, and while I don't know much of the history, by 1990 it was an Alexander's Supermarket -- a local chain in MA and NH that Hannaford acquired that year. Between 1995 and 1998, the store was either demolished and rebuilt or extensively renovated, bringing it to its current 60,000 square feet. It's a layout and design we're quite familiar with by now, having seen it in several recent tours.

We enter to a beautiful produce department in the front-right corner. Cheese and deli line the right-side wall in the back, with bakery in an island facing. Seafood and meat service counters are at the back of the grand aisle, with packaged meat on the rest of the back wall. Pharmacy is in an island in the first aisle with HABA near it, and frozen/dairy are on the left side of the store.

This location has the most recent Hannaford decor package, which looks really spectacular here.

Hannaford shares the Drum Hill Shopping Center with a small (90,000 square feet) but newly renovated Walmart. Needless to say, the Walmart has almost no grocery selection, possibly because Hannaford has an exclusivity clause in their lease.

Floral and bakery on the left side of the grand aisle, with the HABA and pharmacy departments on the other side of this island.

I like the bright colors of this decor package.

This store previously had an inoffensive but unremarkable version of a previous decor package.

Deli and prepared foods on the right side, at the back of the grand aisle.

And service meat and seafood are up next on the back wall.

The above wall is at the back of the bakery/pharmacy island, facing the back wall of the store.

Once again here, I love the bright wall colors. This store was remodeled in 2021, when sister chain Stop & Shop was doing their unbelievably boring all-gray remodels. Thankfully, they've moved past that decor package now.

Here's a look at pharmacy and HABA in the first few aisles.

Hannaford shares a natural/organic brand with Stop & Shop and the other Ahold Delhaize chains -- Nature's Promise, which you can see in the picture below -- but also has its own storebrand, which is simply called Hannaford (you can see the white boxes with red stripes above).

Ahold Delhaize, by my count, has three mainstream storebrands (excluding natural or nonfoods or the like). Food Lion and Hannaford, the legacy Delhaize chains, each have their own brands, while the legacy Ahold chains share an unnamed brand using the fruit-slice logo.

Aisle 12, for the aisle 12 enthusiasts out there. Even though I'm not on Flickr anymore, I still try to get aisle 12s when I can!

Frozen foods are in the last two aisles.

The front-end is a little abbreviated, with only 5 staffed registers and a large bay of self-checkouts. That seems pretty typical for Hannaford, although I don't have a whole lot of experience with the chain.

This is actually the last Hannaford we'll be seeing in Massachusetts, but I have tours of a few more in other states!

Tomorrow, we're crossing the Merrimack River to enter Lowell and check out a small store on the western edge of the city!