Co.opmart Brand Guidelines: Saigon Co.op’s 1996 Cống Quỳnh Supermarket & Its Chain

A union of city cooperatives opens a supermarket.

Co.opmart belongs to Saigon Co.op, whose full Vietnamese name translates as the Union of Trading Cooperatives of Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnamese Wikipedia says it was formed on 12 May 1989, when the city authorities converted the board that managed the city’s purchasing cooperatives into a union with two roles: trading directly, and organising the cooperative movement. It describes Saigon Co.op as a cooperative organisation based on collective ownership, running its own business and answering for its own results.

The union looked abroad in its early years. Between 1992 and 1997, Vietnamese Wikipedia says, it formed joint ventures and partnerships with foreign companies, and it was one of a small number of city organisations holding a direct import-export licence.

The supermarket chain began on 9 February 1996, when Co.opmart Cống Quỳnh opened on Cống Quỳnh street in District 1, the city centre. Vietnamese Wikipedia says the store opened with help from cooperative movements in Japan, Singapore and Sweden. Two years later, in 1998, the first members’ congress of Saigon Co.op set the Co.opmart chain as its main line of business, according to the same article.

The name itself carries the story. “Co.op” comes from the parent cooperative, and the chain has kept that prefix as it has added other formats, from the Co.opXtra hypermarkets to the Co.op Online ordering app.

From one store to a national chain.

For its first years Co.opmart was a Ho Chi Minh City chain. Vietnamese Wikipedia records the first store outside the city in 2003, Co.opmart Quy Nhơn in Bình Định province on the central coast, followed in 2004 by Co.opmart Cần Thơ in the Mekong Delta. The chain reached Hanoi in 2010 with a store in Hà Đông, which the same article says took the national total to 50.

The chain changed its visual identity in 2012, Vietnamese Wikipedia says. Larger formats followed: the Co.opXtraplus hypermarket at Linh Trung, in Thủ Đức, opened in 2013; the Sense City shopping centre in Cần Thơ, an upgrade of the Co.opmart there, in 2014; and the Co.opXtra hypermarket at Tân Phong, on two floors of the SC VivoCity mall in District 7, in 2015. On 19 October 2018 Co.opmart Duyên Hải, in Trà Vinh province, became the 100th store in the chain, according to the same article.

In June 2019 Saigon Co.op bought out the Vietnamese business of the French retailer Auchan, the two companies said in a joint statement, VnExpress International reported on 27 June 2019. The deal covered 15 stores that Auchan had closed earlier that month, three that were still open, and its e-commerce activities; Auchan’s loyalty members could move to Saigon Co.op’s scheme. Auchan had arrived in Vietnam in 2015 and had 13 outlets in Ho Chi Minh City, four in Hanoi and one in Tây Ninh province, the paper said. Vietnamese Wikipedia adds that Saigon Co.op took over the whole business and staff of the 18 Auchan Vietnam supermarkets from 28 June 2019.

Vietnamese Wikipedia now counts more than 140 supermarkets and hypermarkets across the Co.opmart, Co.opmart SCA, Finelife, Co.opXtra and Co.opXtraplus names.

Vietnam’s grocery shelves.

Southeast Asia’s e-commerce platforms present themselves first through their apps. The home screen of a marketplace carries its name, a run of category icons, banners for the current sale and links to payments, top-ups and delivery services, and that screen does much of the work a shop front once did. Tokopedia, which English Wikipedia says took its name from the Indonesian word for “shop” and the word “encyclopedia,” and Bukalapak, whose name means “open a market stall,” both chose plain Indonesian words that describe what the service does.

Shopping-festival dates and partner programmes carry much of the identity beyond the app. Date-named sales, celebrity brand ambassadors and seasonal campaigns appear on the platforms’ own pages and in the local press; Indonesian Wikipedia records Tokopedia’s ambassadors from 2014 onwards. Programmes for small shops, such as Mitra Tokopedia and Mitra Bukalapak for family-run warungs, take the platform name off the screen and onto counters, signs and receipts.

For Vietnam’s retailers — phone and electronics chains, grocery chains and supermarket groups — the store fascia is a public face alongside the app and the website, and the companies’ corporate pages set out their store formats, sister banners and owners. Store counts and formats in this guide are given only as a dated source reports them.

Corporate pages and the press also carry the ownership story, which in this region often changes the brand itself. Tokopedia merged with Gojek into GoTo in May 2021, TechCrunch reported, and in 2024 it took in TikTok Shop’s Indonesian business, while Bukalapak listed in Jakarta in August 2021 and ended its physical-goods marketplace in early 2025. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — founders, owners, listings and mergers — and says plainly when a fact rests only on the company’s own word.

A premium format, and a court case.

The newest Co.opmart format is aimed at a different shopper. In October 2025 Saigon Co.op opened Co.opmart Pro Vũ Yên at the Vincom Mega Mall on Vũ Yên island, in Thủy Nguyên ward of Hải Phòng, the first premium supermarket model within the Co.opmart system, Viet Nam News reported. The store covers 3,200 square metres and stocks more than 30,000 products, with self-checkout counters, smart lockers and instant electronic invoices. About 80 per cent of its shelves are given to Vietnamese goods, products from the national One Commune One Product scheme and Saigon Co.op’s own labels, and customers can order through Zalo, Facebook, the Co.op Online app or by phone, the paper said.

Saigon Co.op has also been through a serious legal case. In December 2023 the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Court convicted a former chairman of the union of abuse of power, and several other former officials of related offences, over the use, from March 2016 and without board approval, of company capital raised for a planned purchase of the Big C supermarket chain to make outside investments, The Investor reported on 30 December 2023. The court ordered the two companies that received the money to repay the resulting loss to Saigon Co.op. In September 2024 an appeal court in Ho Chi Minh City reduced the prison sentences, The Investor reported on 5 September 2024.

For a design system, Co.opmart spans a wide range of buildings: a 1996 city-centre store, provincial supermarkets, hypermarkets in shopping malls and a premium store in a new development in Hải Phòng. Its family of names — Co.opmart, Co.opXtra, Co.opmart Pro, Co.op Online — keeps the cooperative’s prefix in front, so the parent is visible in every format.

For a design guide, Co.opmart shows how a cooperative’s name can become the root of a whole family of retail brands. Compare WinMart, the Masan-owned chain that began as VinMart, and Bách Hóa Xanh, the grocery chain of Mobile World Investment Corporation. For this guide we use a co-op blue, a fresh red and a sunlit yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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