When Paul Ruitenberg was asked to transform an empty, aging Pathmark grocery store in Ramsey into an Italian marketplace with the feel of “the old neighborhood,” he had an advantage. He’d been there before.
Ruitenberg previously had been hired to remodel 131 Pathmarks, including the Ramsey store, after the chain was sold to The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. (A&P) in 2007. “I still had all the blueprints,” Ruitenberg said. “It was handy for us that we had them.”
In his more than 30 years designing supermarket interiors, Ruitenberg, director of Cranbury-based Ruitenberg Lind Design Group (RLDG) has seen a number of supermarket chains disappear and their empty stores resurrected by now operators. That convinced him that while supermarket trends, and the fortunes of individual operators, may change, supermarkets aren’t going away any time soon.
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