Laid off from The Fresh Market.

What The Fresh Market layoffs have meant for employees

The reasons The Fresh Market has given for closing stores have changed over the years. In 2014 its chief executive paired four closings with a slower push into new markets, its March 2014 earnings release says, and in 2015 the company decided to leave California to put its growth in the eastern half of the country, according to its March 2015 earnings release. In 2018 it closed stores its chief executive described as long-term underperformers, in 2025 it cited a routine review of its store portfolio, and in 2026 it decided not to renew the Montvale and Vienna leases. Those decisions covered first-year stores and stores open since 2011 alike.

Whether you'd have a Fresh Market to move to after a closing has depended on what else the chain runs nearby. In 2025 the transfers on offer were to nearby locations, according to Grocery Dive, and the chain's other Massachusetts stores were in Hingham and Mansfield, CBS Boston noted, while Montvale's closing would leave Bedminster as its only New Jersey store, NJBIZ reported. The 2015 and 2016 decisions to close every store in California, Texas, Iowa, Missouri and Kansas would leave no Fresh Market in those states, and Smithtown was the chain's only Long Island store when it closed in 2025. If your store is closing, you can look up how far away the nearest other Fresh Market is, since the 2025 transfer offer was for nearby stores.

Severance has been a line in what the company counts as the cost of a closing. Its earnings releases folded severance into the charges it expected for the 2014 and 2015 closings, next to lease costs, and its 2022 IPO filing gave employee and severance costs a separate line in the years it closed stores in 2018 and 2019. Those figures are yearly totals across every store that closed. If The Fresh Market hands you a severance agreement, you can ask for better terms, and negotiating a severance agreement shows how people go about it.

At the Houston closing in 2014 and the California closings in 2015, the dates the company gave for closing to shoppers came weeks before the effective dates on the stores' notices. In March 2014 it said the four stores would close within a week, and May 6, 2014 is the effective date Texas gave the Houston store's notice, per our WARN tracker. The company said the California stores would close to customers by March 31, 2015, and their notices carry May 4, 2015 effective dates. In 2025 the Framingham notice put December 14 on the jobs, while a spokesperson said the store's last day would depend on when its inventory sold out, CBS Boston reported. If you got a written notice and your store is running a clearance sale, you can keep that notice with your pay records, since its date and the store's last day may differ.

In July 2018 the company said it didn't anticipate more store closures in the near future, Fortune reported, and its IPO filing shows it closed one more store in September 2019 and another that November. Its 2025 decisions to close two young stores came in the same year it opened five new ones, two near Chicago in Northbrook and Algonquin, with a store in Chicago's Old Town planned for December.

If you worked at the Naperville, Montvale or Framingham store, Illinois unemployment, New Jersey unemployment and Massachusetts unemployment set out each state's claim process. If your health insurance came through The Fresh Market, how COBRA works covers holding on to it after the job ends.