Grocery Archaeology

There's nothing like a bargain! Or at least that's what Pantry Pride seemed to think in September 1975 when they ran this ad. Pantry Pride was the lower-end, more value-focused branch of Food Fair, and their stores populated the Elizabeth area at Spring and Jersey and in Elmora  (where my father later worked when it was a Foodtown), where the SuperFresh in Roselle is now, and where the Stop & Shop in Union is now. Man, I want fresh trout at 69 cents a pound. Every once in a while I'll get really nice fresh rainbow or steelhead trout and I love it. Anyway, tomorrow is our last day of ads and we are ending on a very famous name everyone here is going to know!

Original Tenant: Pantry Pride Address: 2497 Brunswick Pk, Lawrenceville, NJ Opened:  1960s Closed:  1979 Later Tenants:  ACME Markets (1979-2018) > LIDL (2021- ) Photographed:  January 2021 Another store I visited with bad timing! I was here at the Lawrenceville ACME about two years after it closed, and just a few months before LIDL opened. I managed to capture the store with its facade torn off, showing what I assumed to be not much of anything -- just some structural brick. Well it turns out that this space was originally built as a Pantry Pride which ACME acquired in 1979, and the brick we're seeing was Pantry Pride's original facade. Here's a look at what Pantry Pride would've looked like. I won't go into too much detail on ACME's history here since Acme Style has already done multiple posts on this location, but I'll just add that LIDL takes up roughly 28,000 square feet of space which appears to be exactly the footprint of the ACME. LIDL is open ...

Original Tenant: Food Fair Address: 1157 US-46, Parsippany, NJ Opened: likely 1960s Closed: 1970s Later Tenants: Pantry Pride (1970s) > Pathmark (likely 70s-2015) > Target (2018-present) Photographed: January 2020 Our third store of the day is a very interesting one! It looks like this store was built as a Food Fair in the 1960s with the mall, which also had an A&P at the other end. It later became a Pantry Pride when Food Fair converted most of their stores to that banner, later selling to Pathmark probably around the 80s. The Food Fair also probably was paired with a JM Fields department store. It's hard to tell exactly where the supermarket originally ended, but the space currently occupied by Target is roughly 75,000 square feet and the Pathmark space was probably around that size or slightly smaller. Lots more information and a great picture of Pathmark in business here . Don't forget to check out today's final post at the Patel Brothers across the str...

Original Tenant:  Food Fair Address:  190 Elmora Ave, Elmora, Elizabeth, NJ Opened:  1960s Closed:  1970s Later Tenants:  Pantry Pride > Mayfair Foodtown > Cost Cutters > Elmora Farmers Market/Dollar General Photographed:  ca. 2005, 2008 Repeating that first picture from our 2017 store tour of the Elmora Farmers Market , which takes up a little more than half of this former supermarket. This time, we have a little more material. Namely, a glimpse of the Food Fair arch still intact as late as 2005... Okay, yes, this is a picture of the Dunkin' Donuts outparcel. But you can see the yellow arch in the background of the image! (The Dunkin' Donuts was for a very long time a favorite hangout of my family's older members, along with the White Castle on the other side of the train tracks.) But for a better picture... Here's a look at the store under construction back in 2008. This is very interesting to me... apparently the fac...