Summerhill Market, a wildly popular Toronto grocer, has opened their newest outpost in Forest Hill.
The new location has been underway for nearly two years, and welcomed customers at their soft opening last Wednesday. Perched on the bustling Eglinton strip just west of Avenue Road, the Forest Hill Summerhill Market boasts a two-storey, 7, 200 square-foot store filled with a hand-picked selection of grocery and pantry goods.
Summerhill Market is well-known for its highly-curated selection of groceries and products, including goods made and prepared locally as well as products that are not easily found in Canada.
What the company has focused on in recent years, though, is its expanding line of prepared meals. Summerhill Market has a wide-array of freshly-prepared foods that are made for convenience without jeopardizing taste.
All their prepared foods, which include heat-and-eat meals and baked goods, are made from scratch every day at the Summerhill Market commissary facility in Toronto. They are rolled out into all four Summerhill locations, arriving by the truckload twice a day.
“The idea is very much what I think you’d see in Europe,” says Brad McMullen, the company’s president and grandson of original founder Frank McMullen. “It’s a smaller footprint grocery store but we’ve really focused on our prepared foods.”
Brad McMullen, company president and grandson of original owner Frank McMullen, stands along a wall-length fridge of prepared foods at Summerhill Market in Forest Hill.
While their ground level is reserved for what McMullen describes as the “daily essentials” such as produce and dairy products, the second level is filled with Summerhill’s wide-range of prepared food items.
The meat counter, frozen products and miscellaneous pantry ingredients can also be found on the second floor.
Ground level: produce, dairy products, grocery essentials, baked goods.
Second level: Frozen products, assorted pantry staples, meat counter, prepared foods.
The Forest Hill neighbourhood has always been a point of interest for this family-operated business. McMullen says that his father, company owner Bob McMullen, had scoped out this exact location before it was even up for sale.
“There was an EDO sushi place here and there was a fire in it. He said that if one day it came up for sale, it would be a good spot for us,” says McMullen. “One day it came up and we bought it the same day we saw it.”
McMullen says it wasn’t an ideal time to acquire a new location, as they had still been in the process of completing construction at their Annex store at the time, but his dad viewed the location as a rare opportunity that they needed to jump at.
It seemingly has paid off too. After only their second day of operating, the grocery store has seen an unexpected amount of foot traffic at the new outpost.
“This day and age, word spreads so fast, so we just opened the doors,” says McMullen. “We had basically a full day of business [our first day].”
The Forest Hill location has some updated features that set it apart from their other sibling stores. Most notably, the two-storey facility, a first for the grocery chain, which can be accessed by two staircases and two passenger elevators. The new store also has a massive 150-car parking lot right behind the building.
The new location is located at 484 Eglinton Avenue West and is open daily from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
