Wegmans
supermarket chain in the northeastern United States

Wegmans Food Markets, Inc. is a privately held American supermarket chain. As of early 2026, Wegmans had 114 stores in nine states (New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Virginia, North Carolina, Connecticut, and Delaware) and the District of Columbia.
It is headquartered in Gates, New York, and was founded on January 30, 1916, in Rochester, New York. Wegmans has appeared on Fortune's annual "100 Best Companies to Work For" list since the list first appeared in 1998. The company has been listed among the top four on the "100 Best Companies to Work For" list since 2016, but as of 2022, the company was listed among the top six.
The largest Wegmans store is located in DeWitt, New York, and measures about 160,000 sq ft (15,000 m2). Wegmans' smallest store is located in East Rochester, New York, on Fairport Road, measuring 53,000 sq ft (4,900 m2).
History
Wegmans is a privately owned company, founded in 1916 by brothers John and Walter Wegman as the Rochester Fruit and Vegetable Company. Originally started as a produce cart, the first store opened in 1917 at 72 West Main St.
“Wegmans” enters the record as supermarket chain in the northeastern United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wegmans, supermarket and chain can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Wegmans” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Wegmans, supermarket and chain provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11288478. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2026, 1916, 1998 and 2016.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wegmans” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.