TOUR: Rastelli Market Fresh - Evesham, NJ

Rastelli Market Fresh

Owner: Ray Rastelli Jr.

Opened: 2014

Cooperative: none
Location: 710 NJ-73, Marlton, Evesham, NJ

Photographed: January 2021

It's our second to last store here in New Jersey, and it's an impressive one! We arrive at the 35,000 square foot Rastelli Market Fresh in Evesham Township (also referred to as Marlton), which opened in about half of a Genuardi's in 2014. It's Rastelli's second retail location (their first is to the southwest in Deptford, and is much smaller). The butcher shop-turned-gourmet grocer also has a very large wholesale division, which today is the business's focus.

Like Patel Brothers in East Windsor, Genuardi's facade is fully intact here but inside, there's nothing left from the former tenant. The interior has been beautifully renovated by Off the Wall, a name that I'm sure is now familiar to any readers of this blog. We enter to a spacious produce aisle with service departments lining the right side of the store. This grand aisle takes up about half of the store's sales floor, and the left half is grocery, dairy, frozen, and liquor.

This store does have the competition of Sprouts just up the street, which is also a very nice and well-run store. There's also a Whole Foods and a ShopRite here in Marlton/Evesham.

Coffee/juice is on the front wall next to the entrance, with a spacious seating area nex to it. A variety of interesting prepared foods counters take up the rest of the right-side wall, with the Grill & Taqueria first...

...and hot food, chopped salads, and pizza next. Sandwiches are in an island facing, with sushi and seafood up next on the side wall.

Along with sushi and seafood is a raw bar, which was closed for the coronavirus. Meat and seafood are the heart of Rastelli's business overall, so it makes sense that this area is very substantial. I was surprised at the large food court, though, as well as the large general grocery selection. I didn't expect that they'd try to be competing with ShopRite in that way.

Bakery island in between seafood and meat. I will say that I was a little disappointed with the bakery -- lots of beautiful stuff, but it didn't look like much was made on-premises and what I did try was not the greatest. This brings me to a complaint about the store in general -- it's really beautiful, but I didn't think the offerings overall were that special. Specifically, I didn't think the quality was great on some of the higher-end items. I'm all for a high-end supermarket, if you actually have the products to back up the pricing and so on. This is the same decor package that Off the Wall has been using for McCaffrey's, whose Pennsylvania stores we'll see shortly, and so it invited the comparison to me, when it's hard to beat McCaffrey's quality.

That's not to say, though, that Rastelli isn't a very good store. It is, but it's more visually impressive than impressive in terms of its products.

Deli and bakery island. This is absolutely gorgeous!

And the butcher shop, of course, in the back of the grand aisle.

Meats and dairy continue across the back wall.

And the cheese island is at the back of produce. The cheese was quite good, both in terms of selection and quality.

Wow!

And now we move on to the grocery aisles, which are very attractive but again I found the product selection to be more mainstream than I was expecting.

Here we can also see the liquor department on the side wall of the store.

More nonfoods products than I was expecting, too. That's not at all a bad thing but it was a little bit of a surprise. By the way, Rastelli uses Hy-Top, Seven Farms, and Life Goods from Bozzuto's in CT.

Nice flooring, though. Pleasantly neutral but not too boring.

And in the last aisle, we move onto dairy and frozen.

The front part of the last few aisles is beer and wine with some beautiful decor. I also love the wood paneling at the top of the cases. And now for the front end...

More beautiful design! Well, that's all for today (don't forget to check out Sprouts close by here, too). And tomorrow is our final New Jersey store! Come back here on The Independent Edition to check it out.