Two More Kings Food Markets Are Closing in New Jersey
There is a grocery store that a lot of New Jersey still talks about like it is a neighbor. Kings. Not a big box, not a discount warehouse, just the upscale market with the serious cheese section, the prepared foods, and the feeling that somebody actually cared about what went on the shelf. So when two more of them get a closing date, it is worth paying attention.
Two Kings Food Markets in New Jersey are closing this winter. The Hillsdale store in Bergen County and the Whitehouse Station store in Hunterdon County will shut down by January 2, 2027. Albertsons, the grocery giant that owns Kings and Acme, says the leases are expiring and are not being renewed. That is the official story, and it tracks with what we have seen lately. The Edgewater Acme closed in August after Albertsons could not reach a lease deal in time and lost the space to ShopRite, which opened there in September.
This is a pattern, not a one off. 168 employees work at the two Kings stores, and Albertsons says it hopes to place as many of them as possible at nearby locations, with the rest let go by that January date. Fourteen Kings stores will remain in New Jersey, alongside 67 Acme Markets. That is still a real footprint, but it is a much smaller version of the Kings New Jersey used to know.
Kings started in 1936, and at its peak it ran close to two dozen stores across the state. The chain filed for bankruptcy in August 2020, and Albertsons bought it that year along with the Balducci's name. Since the takeover, the closures have come steadily. Chatham closed by September a couple of years back. Maplewood, Long Hill, Hoboken, Bernardsville, and Warren are already gone. Now Hillsdale and Whitehouse Station join the list.
If you have shopped at either store, you know what is actually being lost. In Hillsdale, Kings is the anchor of the Plaza at Hillsdale, sitting alongside a Walgreens, a Bottle King, a Sherwin Williams paint store, and an Italian spot, Domani Ristorante Italiano. It is the kind of center where the grocery store is the reason for the trip and everything else benefits. Nobody has said publicly what replaces the Hillsdale space yet, and the center's owner, Kimco Realty, had not responded to questions as of early October. That silence matters, because an empty anchor grocery box changes a whole plaza.
For regulars, the deeper story is what Kings represents. It is one of the last old guard New Jersey grocery names still standing with any scale. A&P is long gone. Pathmark too. Foodtown fights on in pockets. Kings has been the survivor, the one that still felt like a local institution even after the Albertsons sale. Every closure shaves that down a little more, and the shoppers in Hillsdale and Readington Township now face the same question shoppers in Maplewood faced last year: where does the good cheese go?
The honest answer is that the stores are not dying because people stopped shopping there. They are dying at the lease table. Albertsons is running a national portfolio, and when a lease in an expensive New Jersey corridor comes up, the math on the corporate side wins. That is the business. But groceries are personal in a way most retail is not. People build their weekly routine around a store, they know the butcher's name, they know which aisle has the good olives. You cannot spreadsheet that away, and when the store closes, the town feels it.
Both stores stay open through the holidays, so there is time for one last proper Kings run. Stock up on whatever you love most from that cheese counter, say goodbye to the staff if you know them, and keep an eye on what moves into those spaces. If the Edgewater script repeats, another grocer, possibly ShopRite, will be watching the Hillsdale location closely. Whitehouse Station is the bigger question mark.
January 2, 2027 is the deadline. After that, New Jersey has 14 Kings stores left, and a name that started in 1936 gets one step closer to being a memory.