TOUR: Twin City Supermarket - Plainfield, NJ

Twin City Supermarket
Owner: Alfonso & Myrna Perez

Opened: early 2000s

Cooperative: Retail Grocers Group

Location: 600 Park Ave, Plainfield, NJ

Photographed: July 2020

It's time for our first store in downtown Plainfield! Admittedly, Twin City is a bit outside of the central downtown area, six blocks southeast of Front Street which is the main street in downtown Plainfield. But it's just up the street from yesterday's ALDI. The store has an interesting history, being built in the 60s as a Finast and then becoming an A&P by the late 70s, then a Met Foodmarket in the late 90s into the early 2000s. Thanks to JoshAustin610 (and the Internet Archive) for the history! And yes, there is an A&P remnant on the property...

Easy to identify this as an A&P sign! It's looking pretty faded nowadays, it might be time for Twin City to replace it. And sorry for the low-quality picture taken from across the parking lot; if it weren't 95+ degrees the day I visited, I would've taken a nice stroll across the parking lot for a better shot. At 31,000 square feet, this is downtown Plainfield's second-largest supermarket. We'll see the largest, Supremo, in a few days.

We enter to produce in the first aisle, and a sale area in the front right corner (it may have been a service department when A&P was here, but almost definitely not since Twin City has been in business). My assumption is that the Met Foodmarket probably kept A&P's decor intact but Twin City replaced all the decor when they moved in. Many of the fixtures, however, are likely left over from A&P.

Here's the sale corner. The produce bins are probably Twin City's, but I wouldn't be surprised if the white shelving is left over from A&P.

As I've come to expect from the Twin City stores, this one is absolutely spotless. Even if the decor and fixtures are older, it's beautifully maintained.

Look how clean the floor is! That's always something I look for.

International aisle is definitely a big draw here. Twin City is big on Latin foods; the owners are Cuban immigrants. Oh, and how could I forget to send you over to my first Twin City post for the Elizabeth location, one of my favorite stores of all time?!

Very nice butcher counter in the middle of the back wall, with a new tile backsplash.

Also left over from A&P is the fact that the freezer cases take up the middle of the store, in aisles 6-7.

It looks like Twin City updated some of the cases at some point, since the freezers, the butcher service counter, and the dairy cases are noticeably newer than the produce and packaged meat cases.

And speaking of dairy, the dairy department starts here on the back wall and continues down the outside of the last aisle (aisle 13). Sorry folks, no aisle 12 picture here. It seems the only time I remember to photograph an aisle 12 is in stores with fewer than 12 aisles...

And in the front corner of the store at the end of aisle 13, we have service seafood and deli/hot food. This store, like most Latin-focused stores in the NY area, doesn't have a bakery.

Nice seafood department though, which I believe is an outside vendor.

I should've tried the hot food here for lunch, but I can say that Ferraro's Pizza a few doors down does have excellent pizza.

A look across the front end, with customer service in an island near the entrance/exit. I think that's all for Twin City, but we're just getting started here in Plainfield! We'll spend a little more than a week more in town, mostly wandering along Front Street. And tomorrow, we start at the southwestern end of Front Street for a small store here on The Independent Edition!