Overnight fire at New Bedford’s specialty food distributor “Sid Wainer and Sons”

The New Bedford Fire Department responded to a fire at the Sid Wainer & Son building around 1:00am Tuesday morning.

Responders arrived to find seven of the specialty food distributor’s tractor-trailer trucks ablaze in the loading dock. Some trucks were completely destroyed, others partially so.

A preliminary investigation suggests that the fire originated in one of the trucks before spreading. Some of the food inventory was affected by smoke damage, but otherwise, the building itself sustained little to no damage. No injuries have been reported.

This comes at a time when the food distributor had been demonstrating solidarity with the community during the COVID-19 pandemic by hosting pop-up events so locals could purchase produce at a lower cost.

Sid Wainer and Sons has had a presence in New Bedford for over a century, having been established in 1914.