TOUR: Patidar Supermarket - Hillsborough, NJ

Patidar Supermarket

Owner: unknown

Opened: 2018

Cooperative: none

Location: 649 US-206, Hillsborough, NJ

Photographed: July 2020

Our final Hillsborough store is also our final Greater Somerville store! In 2018, local Indian grocery chain Patidar Supermarket opened up in 24,000 square feet of a former Edwards-turned-Stop & Shop in the southern part of Hillsborough. This part of New Jersey is one of the Indian immigrant enclaves in the northern part of the state, and Patidar is Hillsborough's first Indian grocer.

Patidar, which also has a few other locations in this area, took the right half of the store. There's really nothing left from Stop & Shop inside, and Patidar installed all-new fixtures and decor, making it a really nice store. Unfortunately, it's extremely hard to get into and out of compared to the other stores here in Hillsborough, and it's set way back from the street with no good signage. That seems to be rendering it less-than-packed at times when the other stores are pretty busy.

We enter to produce in the front right corner (here we're looking across the front of the store from produce towards the registers, with the entrance being at the end of the freezer cases on the left). Frozen and refrigerated foods line the right side of the store, with grocery aisles in the center of the store. What appears to have been a food court and/or bakery is in the back left corner of the store.

The store is large, spacious, bright, clean, and totally deserted. There were a few customers around, but I wonder if it ever gets very busy.

An overview of produce looking back up towards the front wall.

And winding our way through the refrigerated and frozen section, along the right side wall of the store...

As we can see in the picture above, we can look across the middle dividing aisle of the store from the right to the left side. Notice that the first aisle, here, is numbered 13 and the last aisle is 1.

And heading into the grocery aisles...

Nonfoods in aisle 8.

Because Patidar is a bit larger than most of the Indian supermarkets in northern New Jersey, there's a larger selection of more mainstream grocery products, shown here in aisle 6. Note also that the storebrand products featured here are actually Krasdale brand.

Former food court and/or bakery on the back wall of the store. It's hard to tell whether this was closed at some point after the store's opening, temporarily closed for the coronavirus, or simply never opened (which looks to be the story here, since there's no evidence of food-prep or serving equipment behind the counter, now covered with general merchandise).

Bulk foods and rice in the last aisle.

Looking back towards the first aisle from the last...

...and looking from the front of the last aisle to the back.

Here's a look at the front end with more general merchandise. This is a really nice store with a great selection of groceries, but it doesn't seem to be particularly high-volume. We'll have to see how it does going forward! That's all for Greater Somerville, and now we're going to head to the northeast for our next group in the Plainfield area!