A Safeway man opens his own store.

Albertsons began with a grocer who left one chain to compete with it. Supermarket News, in a history by Elliot Zwiebach published on 24 November 2003 and drawing on a 1975 interview with the founder, says Joe Albertson was working for Safeway in Kansas when the company sent him to Idaho in April 1939 to open a store. Three months later he decided to open one of his own.

He could not fund it alone. The paper says he went into partnership with L.S. Skaggs, a former Safeway divisional vice president who had begun opening Payless Drug Stores, and Tom Cuthbert, Skaggs’ accountant, and that he borrowed the rest of his share from his wife’s aunt. English Wikipedia dates the opening of the store in Boise to 21 July 1939.

The first Albertson’s Food Center, Supermarket News says, faced several Safeway stores in the Boise area. Albertson recalled stocking it with things meant to draw shoppers in: a scratch bakery, a magazine rack, a hot roasted-nut machine, doughnut and popcorn machines and ice cream made in the store. A price war followed from July to December 1939, and the store came through it. The partners opened a second store in Nampa, Idaho, in June 1940 and a third in Caldwell that December.

By the end of 1944, the paper says, Skaggs and Cuthbert preferred to put their money into drugstores, and Albertson bought them out. Wikipedia says Albertson’s, Inc. became a public company in 1959. Albertson stayed close to where he started: he told Supermarket News that his office stood next to the site of the first store and that he walked through it every morning on his way to work to talk with customers. Wikipedia says that original building was rebuilt onto several times, demolished in 1979 and replaced by a new store on the same property, and that a brick monument now marks the site.

Skaggs again, American Stores, a split and a Safeway merger.

The Skaggs connection returned a generation later. Supermarket News says that in 1970 Joe Albertson and Sam Skaggs, L.S. Skaggs’ son, formed a partnership to run Skaggs-Albertsons combined food-and-drug stores in the South, a venture Wikipedia dates to 1969; the partnership was dissolved in 1977 and the stores were divided between the two sides. Albertson remained president until 1972, when he became chairman.

The company then grew by buying other grocers’ names. Its purchase of American Stores Company — dated to 1998 by Wikipedia and to 1999 by Supermarket News — brought in Acme, Lucky, Jewel and Jewel-Osco, and the Osco and Sav-on drug chains, so that an Idaho company came to run long-established banners in Philadelphia, California and Chicago.

In 2006 the company was broken up. Wikipedia says the sale, announced on 23 January 2006, gave SuperValu the larger part of the business, including the Albertsons brand name and its stronger divisions, while the rest became Albertsons LLC, bought by a consortium led by Cerberus Capital Management and held as AB Acquisition LLC; the deal closed on 2 June 2006. The two halves came back together in March 2013, when SuperValu sold its Albertsons, Acme, Shaw’s and Jewel-Osco business to Cerberus.

On 30 January 2015 Albertsons acquired Safeway Inc., the company Joe Albertson had worked for, bringing in Safeway, Vons, Pavilions, Randalls, Tom Thumb and Carrs. Wikipedia says the parent, renamed Albertsons Companies, went public in June 2020 and is headquartered in Boise. A merger agreement with Kroger announced in October 2022 was terminated on 11 December 2024 after a federal judge and a state judge blocked the deal, Wikipedia records.

Design and documentation.

A supermarket brand reaches people through more than a logo. The name on the fascia above the entrance, the lettering on the trolley bays and the colour of the car-park signs are often the first parts of the identity a visitor sees, and they are built to be read from a distance, in daylight and after dark.

Inside, the same identity has to work at a much smaller scale: on aisle markers, shelf-edge labels, department headers and the uniforms of the staff. Those pieces are usually planned as a system, with a fixed set of colours, a limited number of typefaces and rules for how the logo sits beside signs that change every week.

The identity then leaves the store on shopping bags and receipts, and on the packaging of the chain’s own-label ranges, where the retailer’s name or a separate sub-brand appears on everything from cans to cartons. Each guide below sets out who founded the chain, who owns it now and how its name and mark have changed over time, separating what independent sources record from what the company says about itself.

A possessive name and a portfolio of banners.

The Albertsons name started as a possessive. The first store was Albertson’s Food Center, and the listed company was Albertson’s, Inc.; the present company writes the name without the apostrophe, as Albertsons, and its parent as Albertsons Companies. In the 1970s the name also appeared paired with a partner’s, in the Skaggs-Albertsons stores.

Since the American Stores purchase, and much more so since the Safeway merger, the Albertsons identity has had to sit beside other names rather than replace them. Acme, Jewel-Osco, Shaw’s, Vons, Randalls, Tom Thumb and Safeway itself continued under their own banners after joining the group, so the parent company runs a portfolio of regional names, and the Albertsons name is one of them as well as the name of the company. Wikipedia says the merger with Safeway also reshaped the store brands: by late 2015 a range called Signature had replaced earlier Safeway-era lines, and O Organics and Open Nature took over from older labels.

The name has also been stretched into sub-brands. Wikipedia says Albertsons Express, a fuel centre with a convenience store, was launched in 1997 in Eagle, Idaho, and revived in Boise in 2018, and that the Albertsons Market name was revived for Albertsons stores run by the United Supermarkets business, beginning in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in January 2015.

The company has also kept its founding site in view. Wikipedia says the store at the original Boise location was rebuilt in 1979 on the same property, and that a brick monument marks the spot where the first Albertson’s Food Center opened.

For a design guide, Albertsons shows how a founder’s own name can become one banner among many inside a group built through acquisitions, including the chain its founder once worked for. Compare it with Safeway, now part of Albertsons Companies, and Kroger, the grocer whose planned merger with it ended in 2024. For this guide we use Boise blue, Snake River sky and aisle white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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