FoodWay Market
Owner: Pat Conte, Jr
Opened: 2020
Cooperative: Key Food Stores Co-Operative
Location: 2149 Ralph Ave, Georgetown, Brooklyn, NY
Photographed: August 2020
Following Fairway Market's bankruptcy in early 2020, the stores were divided among Village Super Market (4 locations in Manhattan + 1 in Pelham Manor), Food Bazaar (1 each Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island), Amazon (2 in New Jersey), and Seven Seas (this one). Seven Seas also bid on the Red Hook and Douglaston locations, which Food Bazaar won. Seven Seas also owns Key Food-branded stores along with Food Emporium locations in Manhattan purchased from A&P (see here, here, and here).
This 38,000 square foot store is the largest in Georgetown (also see Key Food and Foodtown) and, being a former Fairway, has a very different feeling inside featuring many more organic and gourmet items and higher-end services. The Fairway only opened in 2017, taking over a former Waldbaum's that closed in A&P's bankruptcy, before itself transitioning almost seamlessly to FoodWay in spring 2020. Every indication shows that FoodWay is a great replacement for the Fairway, offering a well-run store in a beautiful facility with all the services of Fairway but at Key Food prices.
Having just been gutted and renovated in 2017, FoodWay did almost no renovations. You enter to a gorgeous produce department and, towards the back of the first aisle, you find coffee/tea and water on the left and cheese on the right. Health and beauty lines the first aisle, with meat and seafood on the back wall. Deli/bakery/prepared foods line both sides of the last aisle, with dairy in the back corner and frozen in the second-to-last aisle.
There had been a few places around the store where the Fairway name had clearly been removed, but this banner was the only place I saw the FoodWay name up prominently. The pictures are misleading as the store was in fact very crowded but it's very spacious, so it doesn't look like there are as many people as there were.
Bulk coffee, packaged tea, and bulk foods take up this alcove, with water at the back.
And, like Fairway, the coffee is fresh-roasted on the sales floor in a giant coffee roaster!
Bulk foods in the front of this room, with produce on the other side of this wall.
Water in the back corner. The next department is cheese...
Fairway's famous large cheese selection has been retained as well, including store-made mozzarella.
A produce butcher to prepare cut produce is at the back of the produce/cheese aisle.
From there, we transition into grocery aisles, with a dividing aisle about 2/3 of the way to the back of the store.
Looking across the store.
Apologies for the blurry photo. My phone had been acting up at the time I visited this store.
I don't know this for sure but I'd assume that the section of the grocery aisles towards the back of the store, seen here, were Fairway's natural and organic department. It seems FoodWay integrates the natural products with the regular ones, which is how I prefer.
Nonfoods in the back section.
Here you can see the back aisles are not that deep.
One shot of the main grocery aisles, before moving to the back wall...
A beautiful seafood counter is the next department on the back wall.
And a butcher, including kosher items, is up next on the back wall.
Seven Seas seems to be an extremely professional operation. Check it out -- they even have brand-new FoodWay carts! (One of which could be found over at the Key Food, by the way.)
Beer and dairy are in the back corner.
Dairy has clearly been reset but the category markers have not been updated... last time I checked, Kozyshack pudding (as much as I love it) is not Organic Yogurt, which is now on the right side of this aisle. Hopefully they'll get on that soon.
A very small bread department rounds out this back corner, with the in-store bakery being next on the outside wall.
Frozen is in the second-to-last aisle with deli and prepared foods in the last aisle.
Self-service hot food and salad were temporarily closed as a coronavirus precaution at the time of my visit, but the other prepared foods and deli counters were full and ready to go...
Deli and smoked salmon, a holdover from Fairway, are in an island that backs up to the grocery aisles.
Sushi, chopped salad, sandwich, and pizza counters line the outside wall of the store. In the front corner is a juice bar as well...
And that wraps up our tour I think, because I seem to have forgotten to photograph the front-end. FoodWay is a well-run replacement for Fairway (if an obvious imitation), but still a good store!
I had trouble figuring out what those metal panels surrounding the support pole in the frozen aisle were at first, as the reflection of the freezer cases made them look see-through to begin with!
ReplyDelete...More related to the store, but still a bit of a general question: I notice that this store has its traditional selection of prepackaged name-brand bread near the bakery. How often do you encounter that? Typically in the supermarkets I've been to, those breads are in a separate aisle/department, not near the bakery. Kroger used to have a layout with breads nearby the service counter, but not since approximately the mid-2000s.
Oh yeah, I completely see that with those mirrored panels!
DeleteThat's fairly unusual, as bread is more frequently placed in the last aisle with dairy a lot of the time, or near the last aisle of the store. Occasionally, it's in an alcove on the front wall opposite the entrance, or -- for reasons beyond my comprehension -- about 1/3 of the way through my local ACME, aisle 5 in a 16-aisle store (?!). I only see packaged bread with bakery every once in a while, but the one that I remember most clearly was at a King Soopers in Denver, CO which I visited well before I started photography. I remember talking to a manager about the placement and he found it odd that other stores put it in the grocery aisles instead of near bakery. So who knows why those decisions are made!
Interesting -- while I was expecting you to say more stores had bread in regular grocery as opposed to by the bakery department, I wasn't expecting you to say it's more typically near dairy or the last aisle of the store! I didn't mention in my first comment that Kroger's new layout is very similar to ACME's, with bread approximately 1/3 of the way through the aisles or so. They do make it a double wide aisle and try to make it a large presentation, though. Truthfully I don't know where it would fit best; as a Walmart shopper I'm used to it simply being down a generic aisle, just like everything else. But it's interesting to hear all these differences, of course. That's funny you mention King Soopers specifically -- that's a Kroger nameplate! I wonder if any of those stores (or maybe even that one) have since changed...
DeleteYeah, I'm not sure. I know in the past it used to have to be on the far side of the store opposite the entrance because it was frequently vendor-serviced (and in many stores, still is, so it doesn't go through the back room, it's brought in directly from a vendor's truck). That means it needed to go through a separate entrance in the past, hence the bread delivery doors Acme Style frequently points out. In many stores, such as the 1950s-era ACMEs, that meant putting it opposite the main entrance so a delivery truck could park in the front of the store and deliver bread without blocking the main entrance.
DeleteHello .......................Pride myself as a quality oriented savvy shopper. So I've always found your beef,seafood and other meat sales to be quite appealing and frankly something to diligently parse over compiling my weekly shopping list.
ReplyDeleteYou were /are one of the few local supermarkets that offered both PRIME and CHOICE labeled cuts of beef at very reasonable sale prices.
Recently noticed that weekly sales circulars no longer indicate in some cases the grade of beef/steak offered up for sale during that particular weekly sales period.
Why is that ? Is there an valid ascribable reason for this ?Could it be that these beef sale items i.e. steaks and roasts are NO LONGER of "choice or prime" quality/category ? Are the steaks being sold as SELECT grade or even a more inferior grade ?
Referring specifically to the porterhouse steak advertised for $7.99 in the 12/10/21-12/16/21 circular .
Hi, I'm sorry but I'm not the owner of the store! I just write about supermarkets and the grocery business. You can contact the store owners at foodwayshop.com. This website isn't affiliated with any individual store or chain.
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