A&P

The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, better known as A&P, is a historic supermarket operator that no longer runs any grocery stores or real estate programs. The corporate entity was liquidated following a Chapter 11 filing in 2015, and all remaining supermarkets tied to A&P banners were closed or sold by 2016. As of December 2016, there were no operating A&P, Pathmark, Waldbaum’s, Super Fresh, Food Emporium, or related stores, and there has been no new site acquisition or development activity since that time.

A&P’s story begins in 1859, when George Gilman and George Huntington Hartford opened a small tea and grocery business in New York City. The company, which later took the name The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, grew from a single storefront into a national force in food retail. By around 1930 it operated approximately 15,000 stores across the East Coast and Midwest, making it the largest grocery retailer in the United States and a frequent anchor or traffic driver in neighborhood corridors and early shopping centers.

Over the following decades A&P shifted from thousands of small neighborhood outlets to larger, self‑service supermarkets. It pioneered private label products such as Eight O’Clock Coffee and built a vertically integrated supply chain that helped define modern supermarket operations. For much of the twentieth century, its banners were fixtures in urban and suburban retail strips, serving as key anchors that shaped surrounding tenant mixes and customer traffic patterns.

From the postwar period onward, however, the company struggled to keep pace with newer formats and competitors. Aging stores, uneven capital investment, and pressure from regional chains and big‑box grocers led to a long period of contraction. In 1979, descendants of the Hartford family sold a controlling interest to the German retailer Tengelmann Group in an effort to stabilize the business. In the years that followed, A&P tried to rebuild scale and relevance through acquisitions, adding regional names such as Waldbaum’s, The Food Emporium, Super Fresh, Pathmark, Farmer Jack, Dominion, Kohl’s Food Stores, and Food Basics across the Northeast, Mid‑Atlantic, Midwest, and parts of the South.

The last roughly five years of A&P’s life were defined by repeated restructuring efforts and an eventual wind‑down rather than expansion. After shrinking from thousands of stores at its peak to a few hundred locations by the mid‑2000s, the company entered Chapter 11 in 2010, emerged in 2012, and then filed for bankruptcy again in 2015. During the 2015 proceedings, many locations under A&P and its various banners were sold to other grocers such as Acme, Stop & Shop, Key Food, and others, while the balance were closed and their leases rejected or marketed through the court process. As of December 2016, all remaining supermarkets tied to the A&P family of banners had either been shuttered or transitioned to new operators.

For landlords, brokers, and developers, A&P’s relevance today is almost entirely as a legacy tenant. Its former supermarkets, neighborhood stores, and urban units have become second‑generation spaces now occupied by contemporary grocers, value retailers, fitness users, entertainment concepts, and other large‑format operators. Many older centers still carry the physical imprint of an A&P or Pathmark box, and some redevelopment projects have centered on reconfiguring or subdividing these former anchor spaces.

The company’s web domain is effectively archival, and there is no active corporate office, real estate department, or site selection function to contact. Any logos, brand references, or contact lists that surface today are legacy items rather than indications of an ongoing chain. While a few nostalgia products and references to A&P’s 1859 heritage persist in the marketplace, there is no current brick‑and‑mortar platform behind the name.