The Independent Edition

India Grocers Owner: Heepal Patel Opened:  2013 Cooperative:  none Location:  1665 Oak Tree Rd, Edison, NJ Photographed:  June 2020 It's time for our third Oak Tree store (see the first and second here). This is probably the strangest store of them all, as we'll see. Built as a 75,000 square foot ShopRite in the 1980s as a replacement store for a 60s location just down the street at 1518 Oak Tree -- now a Subzi Mandi, which we'll see in three days -- this location may have been owned by the Sakers, who own stores to the south, or by the Sitars, who own Carteret and a development just across the Parkway on Oak Tree. Around 2000 it became a Pathmark , which later relocated to the west along Oak Tree to South Plainfield in 2009. That store, at 3600 Park Ave, is now a Saker ShopRite and we'll be touring it when we get out to South Plainfield. But for now, let's focus on this store, which has been subdivided and is now anchored by a 25,000 square foot grocery store -

Apna Bazar Cash & Carry Owner: Khadag Singh Opened:  2005 Cooperative:  none Location:  1700 Sugartree Plz, Edison, NJ Photographed:  June 2020 There is an approximately three quarter of a mile stretch of Oak Tree Road between Edison and Iselin (an unincorporated community within Woodbridge) that has no fewer than six Indian and South Asian grocery stores along it. We're starting here at the farthest west one, although we will be returning to Oak Tree even farther to the west out in South Plainfield later. I must say going into this post that I have quite a few unknowns about this store. The 13,000 square foot store appears to have opened in 2005 as an Apna Bazar Cash & Carry before having a grand reopening in June 2019 following a renovation and a rebrand as Apna Bazar Farmer Market, but that name change is not reflected anywhere outside or inside (or at least was not at the time of my visit almost a year later; we see the storefront with only one lonely faded sign where

Our next group of stores continues just to the south along the eastern edge of the state from Elizabeth. Beginning in Carteret, we'll be wandering through Iselin, an unincorporated part of Woodbridge Township inland a bit (along with a few stops just over the border in Edison along the way) before passing through Metuchen, Fords, and Hopelawn (between Iselin and Perth Amboy), and finally ending up in downtown Perth Amboy where we'll take a look at most of the grocery stores there. In the interest of keeping the groups more geographically focused and shorter, this will only take up the next two and a half weeks or so but we'll be seeing stores here as well as on The Market Report and  Grocery Archaeology . Come back to The Market Report tomorrow to see our first stop to the north! BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! We have some updates at a few stores we've previously toured! Check them out here: SuperFresh - Passaic, NJ Stop & Shop - Allwood, Clifton, NJ ShopRite - Bloomf

Universal Supermarket Owner: Vishu Patel Opened:  between 1997 and 2000 Cooperative:  Retail Grocers Group Location:  2325 Elizabeth Ave, Rahway, NJ Photographed:  May 2019 and July 2021 This is a pretty last-minute update! These pictures are brand-new -- by which I mean that I took them and wrote this post yesterday. And by yesterday I mean that this post went up at 12:00 AM on Thursday and I finished writing it at 11:03 PM on Wednesday. Now obviously I don't usually have such a quick turnaround (there are photos I took back in 2016 that I still haven't gotten around to posting yet), but things are happening quickly here. I was tipped off to a remodel going on at the Universal Supermarket in Rahway by an Instagram post , and I figured that, since this was one of the first stores I toured over on The Market Report, it was time for a revisit. Oh wait, except I stopped by in May of 2019 to buy a few things and use the bathroom and got a daytime exterior picture, which it turns