Cold Storage Brand Guidelines: Singapore’s 1903 Cold-Store Company Turned Supermarket Chain

Frozen meat, ice and a depot on Orchard Road.

Cold Storage began as a refrigeration business rather than a shop. CNA, in a history published on 24 March 2025, says the company was founded as the Singapore Cold Storage Company on 8 June 1903, citing an article by the National Library Board. As its name suggests, it stored and distributed frozen foods and other perishables. English Wikipedia adds that it was then the main maker of ice in Singapore, and that its early concern was a quick turnover of imported meat.

The shop came two years later. On 24 March 1905, CNA reports, the company opened its first retail space on Orchard Road, selling frozen meat, poultry and dairy goods imported from Queensland, in Australia. The first shipment was held in a refrigerated store with a capacity of 400 tonnes at Keppel Harbour.

Ice cream followed. In 1923, English Wikipedia says, a small factory was set up at Borneo Wharf, in the harbour district, to make ice cream under the Paradise name. CNA, citing the National University of Singapore, says the brand was relaunched in 1937 under the name Magnolia. In the late 1930s, according to the National Parks Board as quoted by CNA, the company set up a dairy farm on a plot of about 24 hectares at Bukit Timah, on the initiative of its then managing director, Fred Heron; the herd began with 24 Friesian cows brought in from the Netherlands and Australia. English Wikipedia says the farm’s milk was packed in pyramid-shaped cartons and sold under the Magnolia brand.

The farm closed in the 1970s, CNA says, but its memory survives in place names: Dairy Farm Road and the Dairy Farm Nature Park. On the war years, CNA states simply that Cold Storage remained in operation through the Second World War, which in Singapore included the occupation of 1942–1945.

From counter service to supermarket aisles.

The shop on Orchard Road changed its format after the war. According to CNA, the outlet became a self-service supermarket in 1959; English Wikipedia describes the same shift from counter service to self-service. In the same era the company ran Western-style Magnolia milk bars and snack bars serving ice cream, cakes and milkshakes. CNA singles out the Magnolia Snack Bar at the Capitol Building, which closed in 1988, and quotes The Straits Times of that year describing it as a haunt of students, courting couples and tourists for more than 40 years.

The company also traded across the Causeway. English Wikipedia says its Malaysian arm, through the subsidiary Supermarkets Malaysia, was behind the Jaya Supermarket in Petaling Jaya, completed in the mid-1970s, and in 1985 opened a Majik Market convenience store in Bangsar Baru, Kuala Lumpur, under a franchise from an American company; the format was later phased out.

In 1992 Cold Storage opened its heartland store at Northpoint in Yishun, and in the same year it was bought by Dairy Farm International of Hong Kong, the group now called DFI Retail Group, according to CNA, which says the network acquired then numbered 142 stores, including 7-Eleven convenience stores and Guardian pharmacies. Inside Retail Asia gives the year of that purchase as 1993. English Wikipedia says the brand itself was left largely unchanged under its new owner, and that a multi-temperature distribution centre for fresh and frozen food opened in Singapore in 1999.

CNA says Cold Storage began selling its products on a website in 1997, and English Wikipedia gives the same year. In 2021 it opened CS Fresh Gold, a flagship at the Paragon mall on Orchard Road with a large organic range and an oyster and lobster bar, CNA reported. Under DFI the shelves also carried the group’s own labels, which English Wikipedia names as Meadows and Yu Pin King, while the former Market Place and Jasons stores became CS Fresh and Jasons Deli.

DFI also owned the Giant hypermarket chain in Singapore, which Inside Retail Asia says grew from Shop N Save outlets bought in 2003 and converted to Giant in 2013. Cold Storage and Giant were sold together when DFI left the Singapore grocery trade.

Shopfronts and supermarkets.

Retailers in Singapore and the Philippines tend to present themselves through the store itself before any campaign. Opening hours, location and the name over the door carry much of the identity: a 24-hour department store in Little India, a supermarket in a public-housing estate, a department store anchoring a mall, or a bookshop whose aisles fill up at the start of each school year. The companies in this guide publish store locators, opening hours and seasonal promotions on their own websites, and those pages show how each one wants to be seen.

Store naming is usually plain. Many of these businesses carry a founder’s name, a family name or the name of a parent group. Some keep a single name across every format; others run several store names under one parent. Where a chain runs several store types, its own pages set out which name goes on which fascia, and those choices are described in each guide as the companies publish them.

Corporate pages add the history. Listed groups publish founders, management, parent companies and stock-exchange listings on their investor and about pages, while family-owned businesses often tell their origin story in their own words: a market stall, a small shop or a single store taken over and renamed. Each guide marks which details come from the company and which from newspapers, trade press, heritage bodies or encyclopaedias, with dates.

This guide covers grocers, department stores, electronics retailers and booksellers across both countries. It sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it, when it listed, and how many stores it ran according to a dated source. Colours and type in each guide are an unofficial interpretation, chosen for this guide, and no logo or store sign is reproduced.

A Singapore name under Malaysian ownership.

The sale was announced on 24 March 2025. Inside Retail Asia reported the next day that the Malaysian retail group Macrovalue was buying DFI Retail Group’s Cold Storage and Giant chains in Singapore, a transaction covering 48 Cold Storage and 41 Giant outlets and the leases of two distribution centres, with no property included. CNA listed the 48 Cold Storage stores as trading under the Cold Storage, CS Fresh, CS Fresh Gold and Jasons Deli names.

Macrovalue was set up in 2022 by Andrew Lim Tatt Keong and Gary Yap, Inside Retail Asia says, and had already bought DFI’s supermarket business in Malaysia; English Wikipedia dates that earlier deal to 2023 and says it included the Cold Storage brand in Malaysia. The sale in Singapore went through: in October 2026 The Business Times described DFI as having sold its Singapore supermarket business, comprising Cold Storage, CS Fresh, Giant and Jasons Deli, to Macrovalue in 2025, with DFI keeping 7-Eleven and Guardian in Singapore.

Under its new owner the brand has moved into a new format. On 3 August 2026, The Business Times reported, Cold Storage opened its first Cold Storage On The Go store, open 24 hours, at an Esso petrol station on East Coast Road, selling ready-to-eat meals, sandwiches, drinks, fruit and ice cream. The partner is Aster, which runs Esso’s fuel network in Singapore, and the paper described the format as replacing FairPrice Group’s convenience stores at Esso stations. Lim Boon Cheong, managing director of Cold Storage Singapore, called it a new phase for the business, and Gary Yap said smaller outlets are easier to expand than full-sized supermarkets, according to the same report. The paper gave the March 2025 purchase as 49 Cold Storage and 38 Giant stores, slightly different from the counts given at the time of the announcement.

For a design guide, Cold Storage shows how a utilitarian company name, chosen for a refrigerated store at the harbour in 1903, can outlast the trade it described and carry a supermarket chain through more than a century and several owners. Compare Sheng Siong, a Singapore supermarket chain that grew up in the heartland estates, and Mustafa Centre, another Singapore retailer. For this guide we use a harbour blue, a frost white and a butcher red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cold Storage’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.