TOUR: Top Quality Food Market - Parsippany, NJ

Top Quality Food Market

Owner: Jine Huang

Opened: 2003
Cooperative: none
Location: 818 US-46, Parsippany, NJ
Photographed: May & December 2020

In a small property right in front of a mall containing a former Stop & Shop/Bradlees and a ShopRite/Kmart, we have the 12,000 square foot Top Quality Food Market, a Chinese supermarket -- in fact the only one here in Parsippany which does have other ethnic markets as we'll see. Kam Man isn't far away though.

The store opened in 2003, but feels much older inside so it's possible it opened in what had already been a grocery store. It wouldn't surprise me if one of the Chinese stores here at this location predated the ShopRite, because it's quite a strange setup to have one grocery store in the outparcel of another.

We enter to aisle 12, which is the first aisle of produce and the second is 11. The right side of the store looks to have been prepared foods or the like at some point, but now seems to be long-empty. You can see what I mean in this picture from Google Maps.

The butcher and seafood counters line the back wall. As we see, the facility looks quite old here but it's hard to tell whether the fixtures were brought in secondhand from somewhere else in 2003, or whether they existed right here before this store opened. As we can see, maintenance has not been great at this store. Note the green paint on this case, which actually seems to have been painted on a white case. There's a rough green-and-red color scheme throughout the store.

Seafood is at the other end of the back wall.

Heading into the grocery aisles, we find frozen foods in aisle 7.

Much newer cases on the left, and the cases on the right look like they may be the same age as the butcher case we saw earlier. Do you think these were brought over from the Stop & Shop-turned-Kings-turned-ShopRite across the parking lot when it closed?

 

 The selection here is pretty specifically Chinese, unlike Kam Man which has a variety of eastern and southern Asian foods.

More frozen foods in the last aisle in older cases, like we saw in aisle 6.

Here we see the front end on the front wall of the store, with the offices above. This front end looks similar to a lot of supermarkets, but it's not clear whether this whole section was built out for the grocery store. Anyway, make sure to see the former Stop & Shop across the parking lot here, and tomorrow, we're heading west to the intersection of route 46 and Beverwyck Rd for two stores over on Grocery Archaeology and one on The Independent Edition!