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Special Report: Market 22 - Worcester, MA (Downtown)

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By Zachary
Market 22
Opening: TBA
Owner: unknown
Previous Tenants: assorted non-grocery tenants
Cooperative: none
Location: 17 Mechanic St, Worcester, MA
Photographed: March 28, 2025
Downtown Worcester will soon be getting its first new grocery store in years. That'll happen when Market 22 opens in @ The Common -- formerly the Midtown Mall -- between Front and Mechanic Streets in Worcester. The store was first announced earlier this spring, and is expected to open in the coming weeks but hasn't announced a formal opening date yet. I visited in late March to check on the progress. Read more about the background here.
The store is set up to open into an indoor mall, which has several other storefronts inside also. It faces Front Street with lots of big windows, meaning it'll be very visible from the common. It's very small -- my best estimate is just a couple thousand square feet at most -- and looks like it'll be closer to a bodega or large corner grocer than a full supermarket.
Taking a look inside through the windows on all sides, we can see they're going to have several aisles of groceries, in fact it's not all that small a space but still not quite supermarket-sized. It looks like refrigerated and/or frozen foods are on the outside, to the far left in the image below.
And my best guess is that produce and maybe some other fresh departments will be in this currently-empty space opposite, with the registers on the left side.
A note on the name: no, it's not in any way related to Market 32. If this store does make it to opening under the name Market 22 -- sometimes an independent grocer like this will change their name before opening -- I can't imagine Market 32 would let them keep the name given how it's almost identical to their (much more established) brand.
Downtown Worcester doesn't have a lot of supermarkets, and in fact the only one anywhere near downtown is the Gala Foods on the border of downtown and Main South, which just renovated. So this store will likely fill a need.
It looks like these refrigerators or freezers are secondhand (in fact, you can see Walgreens stickers on them), but the shelving looks new. I'm really curious to see how this store turns out -- will it be more of a supermarket or more of a convenience store? We'll have to wait and see once the store opens. In the meantime, check out this weekend's other posts!
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