TOUR: America's Food Basket - Brockton, MA (Points West)

America's Food Basket

Opened: 2022

Owner: Edwin Polanco

Previous Tenants: Price Rite (2003-2019)

Cooperative: America's Food Basket

Location: 21 Torrey St, Brockton, MA

Photographed: November 11, 2022

Welcome to the second America's Food Basket in Brockton! (The first opened in a converted Bravo on the south end of town about a year before this one.) This one is much larger, at nearly 50,000 square feet, and located in a former Price Rite that you can tour here.

In fact, this store is the largest America's Food Basket, and was one of the larger Price Rites. When I visited shortly after the store's opening, it seemed that AFB was still figuring out how to fill the space. Since I haven't been back, I don't know if it's more full now. Still, the store was looking quite good when I visited -- and nothing like the old Price Rite.

The former Price Rite entrance foyer and register setup is now an extensive deli/bakery and prepared foods department, arranged along this hallway bringing shoppers into the store. (You can see the entrance doors straight ahead in the above picture, and the exit doors off to the left.) The registers are out of frame to the left in the above picture.

Behind deli/bakery, we enter the produce department. The perishables departments are all on the left side of the store -- roughly where Price Rite had their registers and frozen/dairy departments -- with dairy on the back wall and frozen foods on the right side. Grocery aisles now run front-to-back instead of side-to-side, with the registers on the front wall and a large space in front of them. I believe the intention was originally to convert that to a food court, but as of my visit a couple years ago, it hadn't happened yet.

Here's a look across the front-end from the grand aisle on the left side of the store. If I'm not mistaken, Price Rite's produce department was where AFB's registers are.

AFB has quite a few locations in the Boston area, mostly smaller urban stores in predominantly Latino neighborhoods. They also have a few larger, suburban stores, though, such as this one and one in Randolph, just north of Brockton.

Behind the produce department, there's an alcove on the left side with meat, seafood, and some frozen foods like frozen meats. (The rest of the frozen foods are on the right side of the store, with dairy in between on the back wall.) As far as I could tell, all of the fixtures here are new, as is the decor...for the most part.

For some reason, the seafood department is adorned with a "fish" sign from some Kroger store (possibly originally a "meat & fish" sign). It completely stumps me why this sign might have been transported at least 500 miles when every other department has new signage on decals. It's not even...a particularly special sign, right? The other AFB in town has secondhand aisle markers from a Roche Brothers, but that makes sense since there are any number of Roche Brothers within a short bike ride away.

Anyway, here's a look at the dairy and frozen departments, probably located roughly where Price Rite would've had them, too.

While the store does generally look quite good, the one complaint I have is that shortly after it opened, when I visited in 2022, there were a lot of lights burnt out. It was noticeable in-store, at least to me. Did AFB not replace the lightbulbs before opening? It seems like that would be a basic thing that's easy to fix, especially if you're going to bring in a whole bunch of new refrigeration and new shelving, and build out new meat and fish prep rooms and install a full kitchen and bakery.

Newer pictures posted to Google Maps, though, do appear to show all the lights working, so maybe it was just the last small change needed.

Otherwise, as you can see in these pictures, the store is looking really good and has a very large selection. It's probably taken on a bit of the business the recently-closed Stop & Shop nearby had.

Dairy and the rest of frozen on the right side.

Notice that the aisles are divided in half front-to-back, probably to offset the store's larger size overall.

Still, AFB fills all the aisles and all the departments, and in the aisles, the store doesn't feel too large at all. On the front-end, though...

...beyond the registers is an enormous concourse that was empty when I visited. I'm not sure if the food court (or anything else) was ever installed here, but it seems like this is the spot you can really feel that AFB isn't particularly comfortable with stores this large. Otherwise, the space is well-used.

We'll see quite a few more AFB locations around Boston as we move through the area, but for now, we're off to a small independent grocer just east tomorrow!