West Orange—More than 50 members of the West Orange kosher-keeping community attended a meeting at Congregation AABJ&D in early February, to express concerns about the apparent decrease in kosher products at the West Orange Shoprite. JLNJ printed a notice of the meeting in the January 29 issue. A representative from ShopRite’s corporate division was to be on hand to hear and address customers’ complaints.
Village Supermarkets has now addressed these issues in the form of an open letter to the kosher customers of the Essex Green ShopRite in West Orange.
“To our loyal Essex Green Kosher Customers,
We first wanted to thank you for your patience as we collected all your feedback and implemented some changes. We wanted to provide you with an update to the status of the West Orange Kosher Department.
As you may have noticed, we have made some changes to the Kosher Department. In order to better serve our customers, we have consolidated the meat, deli, and fish service cases into one counter located in the meat department at the back of the store. Please be patient with us, as brand new signage to go above the service window is on order and should be installed soon.
We want to let you know that we have not reduced our fresh offerings to you. Instead we have consolidated it to one place to make it a Kosher Destination within the store. There will be no change to the rotisserie chicken service. In addition to maintaining the rotisserie chicken warmer, we will be adding better signage to help identify that they are Kosher.
We will continue to be a full service meat and deli destination. Your deli meats can be ordered at the window, and they are also available sliced and pre-packaged for convenient pick up. We still offer the same variety of fresh cut meat. Our fresh fish will now be wrapped for you in perfect portions. If you do not see the meat, fish, or deli items that you are looking for in the case, please ask someone at the Kosher Service window for assistance and we will be more than happy to get you what you need. We will not be shortening the hours of our Kosher service window and have since posted hours of operation.
We did hear your concerns about us being light on product on Wednesday and Thursday, and have since increased our production to better meet your needs going forward. As always, we are able to take special orders for things not carried on a daily basis, custom platters, or if you are unable to shop during the Kosher Service hours of operation. If you call us during staffed hours we will prepare your custom order and have it ready for pickup at your convenience during normal store hours. We are looking into streamlining the phone ordering process, and will get that information out to you as soon as we have it.
If there are specific items that you are looking for that we do not currently carry, please let me know and we will look into them.
We would like to take this time to thank you for shopping with us over the years and we hope to continue to offer you the same selection of items we have in the past along with the same high level of customer service.
Thank you,
Menachem Baron
Village Supermarkets Inc.
733 Mountain Ave,
Springfield N.J 07081
Ph:(973) 467-2200
Cell: (973) 856-5359
Fax:(973) 736-3148”
By Jill Kirsch
