Seabra Foods has opened its largest supermarket so far at Ferry Plaza, 281 – 311 Ferry Street in Newark, NJ Ironbound.
Available since last month, the new store is open daily from 7am to midnight. Inside, customers will find a wide range of products, a hot food space, a bakery, a fish market, a warehouse area where shoppers can buy in bulk, and an upstairs living area with a cafe called Dee’s Café.
António Seabra, CEO of Seabra Group and a native of Vila Nova de Tazem in Gouveia, cut the tape of this new unit.
There are 103,000 square feet of multifaceted space, diverse and particularly geared toward ethnic communities. The new space includes several food corridors from around the world, from Poland to Jamaica, Portugal and Brazil, as well as Uruguayan products.
Built from the ground up the Seabra Foods’ new supermarket is located in the Ironbound neighborhood’s largest commercial warehouse. The space housed a Pathmark supermarket for decades but was closed when Pathmark’s holding company and The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company filed for bankruptcy. The space was subsequently occupied for less than two years by an ACME local whose closure has left Ironbound without a full-size supermarket until now.
Our newspaper has also learned that Seabra Foods is preparing to open a new facility in South River.
Seabra’s Market was founded in 1971 by a Portuguese emigrant named Americo Nunes Seabra. Americo emigrated from Portugal in 1967 with his wife and six children in pursuit of the American Dream. When he arrived in the US he settled in Newark and worked as a butcher to support his family. From an early age he realized that there was a large Portuguese community looking for typical Portuguese products that were not easily accessible in the US.
Together with his 19-year-old son, Jose Seabra, he decided to open a small grocery store on Ferry Street in Newark which would specialize in selling Portuguese products. Slowly, the company began to evolve and expanded its product portfolio to include not only Portuguese products but products from across Europe, Central America and South America.
Seabra supermarket chain currently has 14 stores across the US in the cities of: Orlando and Pompano Beach, Florida; Attleboro, Fall River, Framingham and New Bedford, Massachusetts; Harrison, Hillside and Kearny, three stores in Newark, New Jersey; Bristol and Cumberland, Rhode Island, and Parkland, Florida.
Presently, António Seabra is the CEO of Seabra Group. Fifty years ago, at the age of 12, he emigrated to the United States with his father and brothers (learn about the story in Mundo Português).
