Wegmans

Over four decades, William Wegman has been involved with painting, performance, video and conceptual art. But he's best known for photographs of his Weimaraner dogs - Man Ray, then Fay Ray, and now Fay's pups and grandpups. Wegman's exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, "Fashion Photographs," is the latest chapter in this long-running light entertainment. Basically, Wegman's shtick involves dressing up the dogs like dolls or anthropomorphizing them in some other way, such as teaching them to play baseball.

Wegmans Food Markets Inc. has inked a deal with the owner of Montgomery Mall to open a supermarket at a Boscov's location idled during the department-store chain's bankruptcy several years ago, mall officials said Wednesday. The planned 125,000-square-foot Wegmans, whose construction date was still undetermined, would become only the second supermarket in the region added to a shopping mall where department stores once reigned as conventional anchors. The first was a 65,000-square-foot Whole Foods that opened in January 2010 at Plymouth Meeting Mall.

ROCHESTER, N.Y. - Wegmans Food Markets says 4,000 pounds of its mashed sweet potatoes are being recalled because of possible contamination with pieces of white plastic. The Rochester, N.Y.-based grocery chain, which has several stores in the Philadelphia area, says the sweet potatoes packaged in 24 oz. plastic trays were sold between Sept. 22 and Nov. 9 in dairy departments at its stores in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, and Massachusetts. They were recalled by supplier Orval Kent Foods of Wheeling, Ill. Wegmans says four consumers complained about the plastic bits.

Smokers, it seems, are going down like ducks in a shooting gallery, with 2008 emerging as the Year Of the Cigarette Ban. Capping a week in which smokers were booted to the curb in city after city across the globe, the Wegmans supermarket chain announced yesterday that it would stop selling cigarettes for the first time since its inception in 1916. The chain operates 71 stores, four of which are in the Philadelphia region. The decision, which takes effect Feb. 10, makes Wegmans Food Markets Inc. the highest-profile supermarket group known to have removed the beleaguered tobacco product from its shelves.

CASS TOWNSHIP, Pa. - A Wegmans fresh-produce warehouse here in central Pennsylvania offers a glimpse of a long-touted fuel of the future. Instead of traditional lead-acid batteries, the supermarket operator is using hydrogen fuel cells to power the electric forklifts and pallet trucks used to load trailers for deliveries of potatoes, strawberries, and mangoes to many of its stores, including the five in the Philadelphia area. "They're great," said Wegmans employee Dave Kloos recently while pumping a pallet truck's suitcase-size fuel cell unit full of hydrogen from a hose, a process that takes about three minutes.

HARRISBURG - The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Friday upheld sales of beer at Wegmans stores across the state, potentially opening the door for beer sales at other supermarkets and big retailers. In a unanimous decision, the seven justices found that the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board properly granted licenses to Wegmans Food Market Inc. to sell beer at eating areas in its supermarkets. The stores have eat-in cafes that meet the liquor-code requirements to get restaurant licenses and sell beer to be consumed on the premises as well as to sell six-packs to go, the court ruled.

Wegmans is recalling all of the Turkish pine nuts it sold from its bulk food department from July 1 through October 18. The store says the nuts may be contaminated with Salmonella, a bacteria that can cause diarrheal illness. Store officials say the recall amounts to about 5,000 pounds of the nuts sold in the bulk food departments of of most Wegmans stores in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, and Maryland between July 1 and October 18, 2011. The bottled pine nuts Wegmans sells in its grocery department are not part of the recall.

Here comes Wegmans - again. The regional grocer's answer to Wal-Mart opened its newest store on the site of a former steel plant in job-rich Chester County. It is the sixth Wegmans in the region and the third in the greater King of Prussia area, which is unusual for a chain that typically spreads its food emporiums an hour apart. The 650-employee Malvern store opened Sunday with a crowd of about 800 lining up outside the doors at 7 a.m. and about 200 Wegmans employees from other areas lodged at local hotels to help with the festivities.

HARRISBURG - You won't be seeing those wine kiosks at Wegmans anymore. Wegmans Food Markets is pulling out of the state's much-criticized wine-kiosk program, dealing a blow to the state Liquor Control Board's efforts to shed its image as a lumbering government bureaucracy and stave off privatization. In a statement late Thursday, the supermarket chain said: "We had hoped that our customers would find the kiosks to be a valuable addition to their shopping experience, but that proved not to be the case.