Foodland Brand Guidelines: Bangkok’s 1972 Round-the-Clock Supermarket and Its Diner

Two small shops that stayed open all night.

Foodland is a supermarket chain in Thailand, run by Foodland Supermarket Co., Ltd. It is not the Foodland of Hawaii, of South Australia or of Canada, nor the FoodLand stores of the eastern United States: English Wikipedia lists each of those supermarket chains as a separate entry under the same name. The Thai chain was founded in 1972 by Somsak Teraphatanakul, English Wikipedia says; the Thai news site workpointTODAY, in a history of the chain published in July 2022, adds that he was known as “Frank” and that he spent about fifteen years working for multinational companies, a job that took him abroad, before going into business for himself.

Bangkok had very little to copy at the time. workpointTODAY and Thai Wikipedia both say that the only supermarket then trading in the city was Daily Lane, in the Chidlom district. In 1972, the site reported, Somsak and seven co-investors opened their first store, Ploenchit Supermarket, in the Ploenchit Arcade, on a floor of about 400 square metres. Six months later he and two other partners opened a second, Patpong Supermarket, of about 200 square metres, in the Patpong district. Both stores stayed open 24 hours a day, and workpointTODAY described Foodland in its headline as Thailand’s first 24-hour supermarket. Thai Wikipedia adds that the Ploenchit store had glass walls and air conditioning.

The first years were slow. Thai shoppers were not yet used to supermarkets with air conditioning and closed doors, workpointTODAY reported, but the founder kept going.

Daily Lane becomes Foodland.

The Foodland name arrived with the third store. According to workpointTODAY, Somsak opened it in the Ekkamai area by buying the Daily Lane supermarket, and this time the store was called Foodland. The two earlier stores were then renamed Foodland as well. The reason was practical: the first two shops had different names and sat in different companies, the site reported, which made them hard to manage, and putting them under one name made it easier to bargain with suppliers. Thai Wikipedia gives the same sequence.

Outside expertise followed. About two years after the first store opened, as competition grew, Somsak hired a Hong Kong retailer with some twenty years in the trade to run the business, workpointTODAY reported; Thai Wikipedia dates the appointment of a Hong Kong managing director to 1974. The chain then grew from stores in shophouse buildings to larger stand-alone stores, the site said.

The network is still centred on Bangkok. workpointTODAY counted 23 Foodland branches in July 2022. Thai Wikipedia lists branches in Bangkok districts including Pinklao, Lat Phrao, Thong Lo, Srinakarin, Patpong and Nawamin, and outside the capital at Terminal 21 in Korat and in Pattaya, and it lists a smaller format called Foodland Grocerant. The Bangkok Post described Foodland in October 2020 as a wholly Thai-owned chain, in a report on its largest store, in the Nawamin area.

The stores are built around more than groceries. Thai Wikipedia says that, besides the supermarket, branches have round-the-clock services such as a pharmacy, a bookshop, a coffee shop and the restaurant Took Lae Dee, which is run through its own companies.

Signs, own labels and store networks.

Supermarket chains in the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand and the United States present themselves through a small set of fixed things: the name on the store sign, the colours of the fascia and the carrier bag, the layout of the shop floor and the names of their own-label ranges. These are the parts of a grocery identity that shoppers meet every week, and they are the parts this guide describes.

Names often carry a group with them. In the Philippines, SM Supermarket and SM Hypermarket put the initials of the SM Group ahead of a plain descriptive word, and the SM Bonus own label repeats the same two letters, while Savemore, a third format in the same family, has a name of its own. Elsewhere, a chain may keep a founder’s name, a place name or an English word written in a local script, and this guide gives each as the company or a dated source shows it.

Ownership takes several forms. Some chains belong to listed retail groups or family conglomerates with interests far beyond food; others are run as co-operatives owned by their store operators, or as businesses owned by their employees. Where a chain has changed hands, merged or been demerged, this guide gives the owner and the date from a dated source, and describes any deal not completed as pending.

Store formats, networks and own-label ranges are given in the companies’ own terms and with their dates, because networks change quickly and a store count is only true on the day it was published. Founders, owners and retail groups are named as corporate pages and the press record them. Colours and typefaces are treated as an unofficial interpretation unless a source documents them, and no sign, logo or package is reproduced.

Took Lae Dee, “cheap and good.”

The diner is as much a part of the identity as the store. BK Magazine explained in May 2018 that the name Took Lae Dee means “cheap and good,” and described it as a 24-hour diner found inside Foodland supermarkets. workpointTODAY traced it back to the first Ploenchit store, where it began as a coffee corner for people waiting while their families shopped; a separate company, Took Lae Dee Co., Ltd., was set up to run it around 1978 or 1979, the site said. The site described a menu of more than 100 dishes drawn from ingredients sold in the supermarket, and a service that lets customers buy ingredients in the store and have them cooked. In July 2022 it counted 23 Took Lae Dee restaurants, one for each Foodland branch.

The diner has travelled further than the supermarket. BK Magazine reported in May 2018 that Took Lae Dee had opened in Singapore, in the Tai Seng industrial estate, as its first branch outside Thailand: a stand-alone restaurant rather than a counter inside a supermarket, run by the Singapore food group Hersing Culinary. In July 2022, workpointTODAY reported, a visit by the singer Jackson Wang of the group GOT7, who praised its American fried rice and corn soup, brought crowds to the Foodland diners.

Foodland has also built names of its own. workpointTODAY reported that the group makes sausages under the Butcher’s Choice name and runs its own bakery brand, Oven Fresh, and that it operates restaurants under franchise from abroad, including Tim Ho Wan. The site said the founder had handed day-to-day management of the business to the second generation, led by Athiphon Teerasongkran.

The name itself is English. English Wikipedia gives its Thai form as ฟู้ดแลนด์, a direct transliteration of the two English syllables, so the chain is known by the same sound in both scripts; the store names it replaced, Ploenchit and Patpong, were Bangkok place names.

For a design guide, Foodland shows how a store can make its identity out of hours and habits: an English name on a Bangkok street, lights that stay on through the night and a diner with a plain Thai promise for a name. Compare Gourmet Market, another Bangkok supermarket chain, and Cold Storage, a Singapore supermarket chain. For this guide we use a basil green, a chilli red and a rice white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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