Riverhead’s newest supermarket will open its doors next summer in the former Waldbaum’s location in Riverhead Centre on Route 58, according to a company spokesperson.
The new ShopRite will be a full-service supermarket, complete with an international foods aisle and a wide selection of organic and natural products.
The location will also include an in-store café and pizzeria.
Customers will also be able to utilize the company’s ShopRite From Home service, which will allow them to order their groceries online and either have them delivered or pick them up at the store.
Riverhead’s ShopRite will be owned by the multi-generational Thompson family, which also owns and operates two other ShopRite stores in Deer Park and Uniondale.
“I live in Eastport, and we saw an opportunity to bring a ShopRite store to the eastern part of Long Island,” said Ken Thompson, store owner.
Currently, Long Island’s easternmost ShopRite is located in Patchogue on Sunrise Highway.
Construction on the store’s interior will begin early next year, Thompson said. The location will employ more than 200 people.
The 60,300-square-foot store has sat vacant since Waldbaum’s closed its doors in October 2015. Waldbaum’s opened in Riverhead Centre in July 2003; prior to that Waldbaum’s was located in the space currently occupied by Staples, where it opened in the mid-1980s. Waldbaum’s supermarkets, acquired by the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company in 1986, closed down after A&P filed a chapter 11 petition for bankruptcy protection in July 2015.
ShopRite Supermarkets is a retail cooperative supplied by Wakefern Food Corporation, based in Keasbey, New Jersey, which has 50 members who own and operate 345 supermarkets under the ShopRite, The Fresh Grocer, Price Rite and Dearborn Market banners in the Northeast. Wakefern reported total retail sales of $16.3 billion in fiscal year 2017, which ended Sept. 30, an increase of 1.5 percent over FY2016.
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