TOUR: H Mart - Burlington, MA

H Mart
Opened: 2009

Owner: Il Yeon Kwan

Previous Tenants: unknown

Cooperative: none

Location: 3 Old Concord Rd, Burlington, MA

Photographed: May 16, 2024

Burlington and its immediate neighbors have quite a few chain supermarkets within a few miles (including Wegmans and Shaw's), but the only Asian supermarket in town is this H Mart. It opened in 2009 -- I'm not sure what was here before H Mart, but the building was built in the late 1990s -- and spans 52,000 square feet.

It doesn't appear to have been renovated since it opened -- the store feels middle-aged for sure, not very old and not very new. We enter to the grand aisle on the right side, with a spacious produce department straight ahead. Lining the right-side wall is a food court with several vendors and a bakery/cafe. Refrigerated packaged foods are in the back-right corner behind the food court, with meat and seafood on the back wall. Frozen foods are on the left side.

H Mart now has four locations in Massachusetts, with a fifth coming soon. In addition to Burlington, they have a small location in downtown Cambridge, an even smaller one in a tiny former Whole Foods in Brookline, and a very large one in a former Roche Brothers in Quincy. They've taken over a former bfresh, the short-lived small-format store prototype developed by Stop & Shop, in Somerville, which is expected to open soon.

The food court is an important part of a lot of H Marts. Here, we have options for Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, and Chinese food.

Speaking of the food...

...here's some Thai curry fried rice and a peanut noodle dish. Both were very good.

Now back to the supermarket side of things!

This store's age shows with things like the color of the floor and the decor (of which we can't see much here because of the boxes towering on top of the produce cases). But it's in quite good shape, and the store overall seems fairly high-volume and well-maintained.

In the back-right corner, behind the food court, a small alcove has cases with refrigerated prepared foods and items like kimchi.

The meat department then runs along the back wall. It forms an aisle, with the produce department on the other side of the cases to the left. Again, we see very high stacks of boxes on top of all the cases.

A large service seafood department is up next on the back wall, roughly halfway across the back of the store.

Despite a significant Asian population in this area, there are relatively few Asian supermarkets. That's not to say there are none -- in fact, we'll see a small independent one shortly -- but those the size of this H Mart are few and far between.

The grocery aisles are pretty standard H Mart, with two sets of shorter aisles divided by a middle aisle. Interesting to note that the lighting is only on the shelves here, with very little on the ceilings over the grocery aisles. Because the shelf lights are very bright, it's not a problem, but if they weren't so powerful it would become very dim.