Penn Fruit

Ghost Corp Apparel — resurrecting iconic corporate ghosts.

Penn Fruit began in 1927, when Philadelphia merchants Morris Kaplan, Isaac Kaplan, and Samuel Cooke opened a produce store at 52nd and Market Streets. Low prices, heavy promotion, and self-service made the little green-grocery operation a serious local contender.

The company soon became a full-line supermarket chain, spreading through greater Philadelphia, New Jersey, Baltimore, and briefly farther afield. By the late 1930s it operated six Philadelphia self-service markets; at its midcentury peak, it was among the nation’s strongest supermarket operators on a per-store basis.

Its most enduring visual calling card was the streamlined arch-roof supermarket: glassy, broad, and built to look fast even while parked. In 1955 Penn Fruit hired architect Victor Gruen for a prototype at Black Horse Shopping Center in Audubon, New Jersey. Grocery shopping got its own small dose of roadside futurism.

Penn Fruit diversified during the 1960s, adding ventures including Gaudio’s garden stores, discount drugstores, Kiddie City toy stores, Dale’s discount markets, and Consumers Warehouse Markets. But the warehouse-store price wars of the 1970s, particularly competition with Acme, squeezed the chain hard. Penn Fruit entered Chapter 11 in 1975; Food Fair acquired its remaining Philadelphia-area stores, and the business was gone by 1979.

Our Penn Fruit collection celebrates the curved roofs, cut-rate confidence, and glorious fluorescent optimism of a Philadelphia grocery original—because nothing says tomorrow like a cart full of canned goods beneath a space-age arch.