Why Whole Foods Opened at Tuscan Village in Salem, NH

For as long as most people in Salem can remember, grocery shopping here has meant one word: Market Basket. Not one store, but three, spread within a few miles of each other around Central Street, South Broadway, and the original storefront inside Tuscan Village. If you wanted a full cart at a fair price, that was the answer, and it had been the only answer since Shaw's pulled out of the area and left the field open.

On July 22, that changed. Whole Foods opened its first Salem location and its fifth in New Hampshire, a 34,900-square-foot store built into Tuscan Village. That part of the story has already made the rounds on local news sites. Whole Foods opened at Tuscan Village after the developer secured approval for additional apartments.

For Salem shoppers, the opening also changes a grocery landscape long dominated by one chain.

The One-Chain Town

Salem's Market Basket locations at 69 Central Street and 265 South Broadway have run the town's grocery routine for years, and the chain's third Salem store opened inside Tuscan Village back in 2019, drawing more than 100 people to its ribbon cutting. That's an unusual amount of grocery-store real estate for one town to support with a single chain, and it happened because nobody else was fighting for the shelf space. Longtime shoppers have noted that once Shaw's closed, prices at the remaining stores drifted up a little, which is the ordinary outcome when a market loses its only competitor. None of that made Market Basket a bad neighbor. It made it the default, in the way a town with one pizza place ends up loving that pizza place by necessity as much as by preference.

That's the backdrop Whole Foods walked into. And it walked in reluctantly.

Whole Foods' Path to Tuscan Village

According to reporting from the Union Leader, Tuscan Village developer Joe Faro told Salem's planning board that Whole Foods had flatly dismissed the idea of a Salem location when he first pitched it, years before the store ever broke ground. Whole Foods agreed to open at Tuscan Village after Faro secured approval to add roughly 300 more apartments to the site in a six-story building.

That building is now called Epicurean, and Whole Foods occupies its ground floor at 22R/24R Via Toscana. Combined, the apartments and the store total almost 500,000 square feet, which made it one of the largest structures in Tuscan Village's plan when design documents were filed. Faro has described a similar experience with Capital Grille. He's said that when he first pitched Capital Grille on a Tuscan Village location, the chain's first reaction was confusion, assuming he meant the more famous Salem across the border in Massachusetts, the one tied to the witch trials, and wanted no part of it. Once that mix-up got sorted out, Capital Grille came around, and the chain eventually outbid Ruth's Chris Steak House for the same space. The two accounts describe different routes to openings at Tuscan Village.

That development context is one part of the story; the shelves are another.

What's Actually Different on the Shelves

None of this means the store itself is an afterthought. Whole Foods stocked its Salem opening with more than 800 items from roughly 180 New England suppliers, curated by the chain's regional forager, John Lawson. A shopper walking in for the first time will find:

• Tomatoes and squash from Brookdale Fruit Farm
• Ice cream from Walpole Creamery
• Maple products from Ben's Sugar Shack
• Bacon and sausage from North Country Smokehouse
• Cheese from Maplebrook Farm, Vermont Creamery, and Jasper Hill Farm

The store also runs a full-service meat counter, a prepared foods section with rotating hot and salad bars, fresh sushi, a bakery, and a dedicated sandwich counter. That's a different kind of trip than a Market Basket run for the week's staples. It's not built to be cheaper. It's built to be the stop you make for something specific, and then you're gone.

That framing matters for anyone deciding where to send their next errand. If the goal is filling the fridge for a family of four on a budget, the math still points toward Central Street or South Broadway. If the goal is a particular cheese, a rotisserie dinner on a night nobody wants to cook, or the kind of prepared sushi you used to have to drive toward Boston for, Whole Foods just closed that gap inside town limits for the first time.

Groceries Are the Least Interesting Thing Happening at Tuscan Village This Month

Tuscan Village's September calendar includes several events at the development. On September 9, Epicurean hosted a wine social for residents and guests, pouring more than fifteen samples from local wineries alongside light bites. On September 19, the property held its September Shoppes outdoor maker market, with live music and local vendors set up around the development's green space. On September 27, it hosts a car meet called REV YOUR ENGINES, timed loosely to the property's Italian branding.

None of these events require you to live in Epicurean or shop at Whole Foods to attend. For longtime Salem residents, that turns Tuscan Village into something worth checking on a few times a month rather than a place you pass through for one errand.

So Which Cart Are You Actually Pushing

The honest answer, at least for now, is both. Salem's grocery routine hasn't replaced one chain with another. It's split into two separate habits that happen to sit a few hundred yards apart. The big weekly cart still belongs to Market Basket, because nothing about Whole Foods' pricing or format is trying to compete on that ground. The specialty trip, the prepared dinner, the cheese you can't get anywhere else in town, that's another kind of errand Salem shoppers can make at Whole Foods, including the people living upstairs.

The site has combined housing with national brands such as Capital Grille and Whole Foods. If you're watching for the next name to land on that property, the apartment plans are worth watching alongside the leasing rumors.

If you're weighing what a specific stretch of Salem, or a neighboring town along the 93/128 corridor, actually offers day to day before making a move, that's the kind of on-the-ground detail worth talking through with someone who tracks it closely. Kimberly Zecher works this market from Andover across the North Shore, Merrimack Valley, and Southern New Hampshire, and can walk you through what a given neighborhood's daily rhythm looks like before you ever put in an offer. Let's Connect.