The Independent Edition

Towne Market Owner: Sal Cassar Opened:  1978 Cooperative:  none Location:  135 S Main St, Phillipsburg, NJ Photographed:  January 2021 Phillipsburg is home to a ShopRite and a Stop & Shop out on route 22 (I guess those are technically Greenwich, but they're both referred to as Phillipsburg), and until recently also an Ahart's Market on 22. But in addition to that, the town has a few small independent grocery stores that are kind of on the borderline between convenience stores and grocery stores. One of them is here in downtown Phillipsburg, Towne Market, and although I didn't go in, it's clearly a wonderful specimen of grocery history. We can also get a glimpse here of downtown Phillipsburg, a quiet riverfront town. The rest of the town is up the hill from the river, and has some beautiful historic neighborhoods. Phillipsburg can be considered part of the Lehigh Valley (the reporting on the closure of Ahart's can be found on lehighvalleylive.com ) and definitel...

Cather's Food Mart Owner: Antoinette Boutros Opened:  1998 under current ownership Cooperative:  none Location:  159 Hudson St, Phillipsburg, NJ Photographed:  January 2022 Our second store here in Phillipsburg is a very old grocery store at the top of the hill above Towne Market , and like many of these stores has been cut back to basically a convenience store over the years. (The store once had a butcher in-store, as evidenced by this obituary .) Online records suggest that the owner since 1998 has been Antoinette Boutros, and that might be true but at the time of my first visit in January 2021, the person who I assumed was the owner was almost definitely not named Antoinette Boutros, but who knows. My January 2021 attempt at photography was thoroughly unsuccessful due to a confrontation with said assumed owner, so unfortunately I have no interior pictures but I did get these exterior shots when driving by in January 2022. The interior is definitely well-preserved...

Gino's Market Owner: Gino Forteburno Opened:  1977 Cooperative:  none Location:  541 Congress St, Phillipsburg, NJ Photographed:  January 2022 I've wanted to come here to Gino's Market for quite some time, and I was initially planning to come here on the same day that I visited Towne Market and Cather's for the first time. Something told me to visit Cather's instead of Gino's, possibly just the fact that it was more on my way home than Gino's, but oh man my intuition has never led me so wrong. I did get to return to Gino's in January 2022, and it was entirely worth the stop. Everyone passing through Phillipsburg should be stopping here for lunch! I did, and I got an amazing sandwich (more on that shortly), and also talked to Gino for a while. He told me all about the history of the store, which began back in 1920 when the Ingersoll company (now Ingersoll-Rand, a maker of industrial and construction equipment) was developing a large part of Phillipsbur...

Dutch Mill Market Owner: Gene Stickel Opened:  1971 Cooperative:  none Location:  561 Milford-Warren Glen Rd, Milford, NJ Photographed:  March 2020 Yesterday we saw the Milford Market in the middle of the town of Milford, and today, we've moved about 2 miles north of town for a look at this 4100 square foot store. Although it's smaller than the Milford Market, this store is more of a full supermarket and less of an expanded liquor store. It's located on a backroad which starts in downtown Milford and ends at the Musconetcong Gorge to the north, just south of route 80. The store has produce in the first aisle, which runs parallel to the front wall. (So here, we're looking at the right-side wall of the store, with the front wall to our right.) Frozen and dairy run along the left side wall of the store, with single-serve beverages and butcher on the back wall, and deli/bakery and checkout on the right side wall. Not a whole lot of produce, but there's certainly some....

Milford Market Owner: unknown Opened:  unknown Cooperative:  none Location:  26 Bridge St, Milford, NJ Photographed:  March 2020 No, in case you're wondering, there isn't simply one long Bridge Street that parallels the Delaware River and passes through all these tiny towns, which all have Bridge Streets. Instead, there's a river crossing at each town which, naturally, occurs at each little town's Bridge Street. In an interesting coincidence, 26 Bridge Street in Frenchtown was an early 1900s A&P, and here in Milford we're finding another grocery store at 26 Bridge St, the 6300 square foot Milford Market. It looks like it's been the Milford Market for a little more than 10 years, but it's been a grocery store for much longer than that (in fact, it's likely that this was an early chain grocery store in town). I can't quite make out the name of the store that was here before , though. Nowadays, the Milford Market is almost all a liquor store, with ...

Frenchtown Market Owner: Ken Traub Opened:  2005 Cooperative:  IGA Location:  28 6th St, Frenchtown, NJ Photographed:  March 2020 Yet another small NJ town, yet another small supermarket! Frenchtown, with a population of 1600, is served by the 10,000 square foot Frenchtown Market, which was built in 1960 as an A&P, replacing a 1900-built store at 26 Bridge St . Up until fairly recently, the store actually retained its A&P decor, which you can see through the windows here . But in 2017, 12 years after the IGA opened, they did a light renovation, replacing the decor (and that's about it). The decor comes to us courtesy of CIP Retail , who seems to have a partnership with Bozzuto's  -- this store's wholesaler. We've seen a lot of DY Design and Off the Wall, but CIP's clients include some high-profile ones such as Price Chopper/Market 32, Rite Aid, Sprouts, Tops Friendly Markets, and RI-based local chain Dave's Fresh Marketplace , which uses a much more del...