Mollie Stone's Markets announced June 15 it is acquiring both United Markets locations in Marin County — in San Rafael and San Anselmo — bringing the eight-store Bay Area chain to ten stores and marking its first presence in the county.

Mollie Stone's Markets, the eight-store Bay Area specialty grocer run by owner and CEO Mike Stone, announced Monday it is acquiring both United Markets locations in Marin County — the store at 515 3rd Street in San Rafael and the one at 100 Red Hill Avenue in San Anselmo. The deal, announced June 15, would push Mollie Stone's to ten stores and mark the chain's first presence in Marin.

United Markets is one of the longer-lived independent grocers in the North Bay. The Saccone brothers opened the San Rafael location in 1955 and the San Anselmo store three years later. Bill Daniels, who came to own both stores outright in 2013, has since died; his daughter Kelly Smith, running the business alongside co-owner Mike Lovi, is the seller. "The Stone family is the perfect fit to continue our legacy and values," Smith said in a statement Monday.

Mollie Stone's, which carries roughly $138.2 million in annual revenue, has had a turbulent recent run — it opened a San Francisco location in 2024 billed as its tenth store, then closed its San Mateo location in January 2026, netting back to eight before this acquisition. The United Markets buy would restore the chain to ten.

The labor picture is worth watching. United Markets employs approximately 135 people, with an average staff tenure the company cites at 15 years — a profile that rarely survives a transaction unchanged. Mollie Stone's has committed publicly to retaining current employees, though no specific terms have been disclosed. Both chains bargain under UFCW Local 5; whether Mollie Stone's will assume the existing United Markets contract or renegotiate is unresolved and unaddressed in any public statement.

Financial terms, purchase price, and a closing date are entirely undisclosed. Mike Stone's statement defers specifics to "coming months." What's already clear is the shape of the deal: a family-to-family handoff, two stores with seven decades of neighborhood presence, and a buyer crossing the bridge into a county it has never operated in before.