The Independent Edition

Hayek's Market Owner: Dan & Denise Hayek Opened:  1939 as Premier Food Market Cooperative:  none Location:  1 Mill Street, Newton, NJ Photographed:  July 2020 Okay, we've gotten our tours of the ShopRite and Weis out of the way here in Newton. Now for the fun! We're heading into the center of downtown Newton, which is certainly not a large city but is a substantial town and the county seat of Sussex County. Hayek's has been around for over 80 years, under various names, and you can read the full history here . Today, in its latest iteration, it's a 7700 square foot supermarket with just about everything but a focus on the fresh items. Before we head in, you see how much rain was falling while I was taking that first picture? Yeah, I was in a hurry to get inside here. I brought an umbrella with me this day but didn't so much feel like carrying it around each of the stores so I ended up leaving it in the car for most of the stops. Let's head in! We ente...

Dale's Market Owner: Ed Campbell Opened:  1983 Cooperative:  none Location:  396 US-206, Branchville, NJ Photographed:  July 2020 We arrive in the tiny Sussex County town of Branchville, with a population of just over 800 (plus one grocery store, of course). Is that the smallest town we've ever visited on the blog? Maybe. This can be debated, but let me pose the following claim: this is the smallest town in New Jersey that has a full supermarket. The only smaller town in the state with a lower population and any kind of substantial grocery store is Stockton, which we'll be seeing in a little less than three weeks, but I'd be hard-pressed to call their store a full supermarket. Meanwhile, Dale's is just 5,000 square feet, but contains a full produce, deli, butcher, dairy, and frozen selection. (Stockton's population is about 500.) It looks like this space may have been a long-ago general store or the like, which was expanded many times. Dale's Market uses th...

Farmer Joen Farmers Market Owner: Ju Gil Joen Opened:  ca. 2014 Cooperative:  none Location:  205 NJ-23 N, Sussex, NJ Photographed:  July 2020 We arrive in Wantage for a look inside the Farmer Joen Farmers Market (formerly the Route 23 Farmers Market) in the Wantage Plaza, just next door to Sussex Meat Packing . This strip mall was also previously home to a Jamesway, later Ames, department store as well as a Foodtown but I'm unclear exactly where each of those was. This roughly 20,000 square foot store is in what I suspect is half of the Foodtown space, but I don't know that for certain. Unlike some of the other similar stores we've seen recently, this is a rather large space displaying almost exclusively produce. I wonder how successful this store is, since we can see it was deserted when I visited. The Sussex County area is a highly rural area, so there's also lots of local produce available around this area. A look at refrigrated produce on the back wall. Lookin...

Sussex Meat Packing Owner: Henry VandenAkker Opened:  1960 in Wantage Cooperative:  none Location:  205 NJ-23 N, Sussex, NJ Photographed:  July 2020 The Wantage Plaza was once home to a Foodtown, which I believe took up roughly 37,000 square feet just to the left of this small butcher shop which is now partially home to the Farmer Joen Farmers Market , which we're also seeing today. (That may have also been the Jamesway/Ames that anchored the mall, in which case this butcher shop would be in part of the Foodtown space.) Heading into the 5,000 square foot Sussex Meat Packing store, we first find a deli along the left side wall of the store. Frozen foods and then service butcher take up the back of the store, with a small dairy section in the front and one grocery aisle in the middle. I wasn't going to stop here (nor Farmer Joen next door), but the strip mall drew my attention with what looked like a former supermarket and then I noticed the two operating grocery stor...

  Remember a while back when we switched from doing things county-by-county onto going by cities and regions? Well, Sussex County is a pretty sparse county, and its total population is slightly smaller than that of the city of Paterson, so we're actually going to see just 14 grocery stores and 1 former supermarket in the entire county. So I'm not sure it makes sense to split it up any further. Sussex County is when we're going to really start to feel like we're out in the country. We're going to start in Sparta just north of Jefferson on route 15 and move north through Franklin, Vernon, and Sussex before going all the way up to the very northern tip of the state for Montague. And that is officially where we end our journey up from Freehold to the north central part of the state! From there, we will begin our final descent -- we will then be traveling from Montague down along the west border of the state, through Branchville, Newton, Andover, and Byram. When we finis...