Gourmet Market Brand Guidelines: The Mall Group’s 1997 Emporium Supermarket and Its Formats

A supermarket born inside a department-store group.

Gourmet Market is the supermarket brand of The Mall Group, the Bangkok retail company behind The Mall, the Emporium and EmQuartier. The Bangkok Post described it in exactly those terms in November 2024: “the supermarket brand of The Mall Group.” It is a separate trading name, not a separate company, and its history runs through the malls of its parent.

The parent is the older business. English Wikipedia says The Mall Group opened its first store on 25 June 1981 on Ratchadamri Road, near the Ratchaprasong shopping district, and that the company is private, owned 65 per cent by the Umpujh family and 35 per cent by the Phataraprasit family. Thai Wikipedia traces how the group grew from that single store into a chain of large suburban malls through the 1980s and 1990s, before it moved into upscale shopping centres.

The supermarket began with that move. The trade publication Inside Retail Asia reported in April 2012 that The Mall Group “opened the first Gourmet Market in 1997 at Emporium,” the group’s shopping centre on Sukhumvit Road. Thai Wikipedia dates the Emporium’s opening to 27 July 1997, calling it the group’s first high-end shopping centre and noting that it opened in the middle of the Asian financial crisis of that year.

The second key address came eight years later. English Wikipedia says Siam Paragon, the shopping centre built on the former site of the Siam Intercontinental Hotel, opened on 9 December 2005 as a joint venture between Siam Piwat, owner of the neighbouring Siam Center and Siam Discovery, and The Mall Group. Gourmet Market took space there, and Monocle described the Siam Paragon store in its April 2024 issue as the chain’s flagship, a large food emporium inside the mall.

For years the brand stayed small. By April 2012, Inside Retail Asia reported, Gourmet Market had just four stores: the Emporium, Siam Paragon, K Village, a lifestyle mall on Sukhumvit Soi 26, and Terminal 21 at the Asok intersection. The group also ran a second supermarket name, Home Fresh Mart, inside its mainstream The Mall department stores; Thai trade magazine Marketeer reported in December 2019 that only two Home Fresh Mart stores remained, at The Mall Tha Phra and The Mall Ramkhamhaeng.

Malls, stations and stand-alone stores.

The brand’s growth outside the malls began with a railway station. In August 2017 The Nation reported that Bangkok Metro Networks, the company that develops retail space on Bangkok’s MRT underground, had reached an agreement with The Mall Group for a supermarket under the Gourmet Market brand at Lat Phrao station, at the Ratchada–Lat Phrao intersection, in a retail section of about 2,300 square metres. English Wikipedia lists the Lat Phrao MRT store among Gourmet Market’s locations today.

A wider push followed in December 2019. The Nation reported that the brand was adding three stand-alone branches in and around Bangkok: one at the Design Village community mall on Phutthamonthon Sai 2, one at People Park in On Nut, and a Gourmet Thai shop at the I’m Chinatown community mall, which opened on 29 November 2019 as the first stand-alone Gourmet Thai store. English Wikipedia now lists Design Village stores in both Phutthamonthon and Bangna, and The Crystal SB Ratchaphruek, among the brand’s locations.

By then the name had split into formats. Marketeer set them out in December 2019: Gourmet Market itself, a full supermarket of more than 1,000 square metres; Gourmet to Go, a 100 to 200 square-metre food shop, then with a single branch at MRT Lat Phrao; and Gourmet Thai, which sells Thai local products aimed at visitors, with shops at the Don Mueang airport retail area run by The Mall Group and at I’m Chinatown. The same report described in-store counters called Dine In and The Dock Seafood Bar, where chefs cook fresh food chosen from the shelves, then in seven Gourmet Market stores.

The flagship has been rebuilt more than once. A Bangkok Post photograph caption in March 2021 shows executives unveiling the Gourmet Market facelift at Siam Paragon. In May 2023 the paper reported that the group was resuming expansion of the brand, and its caption showed the official opening of a stand-alone store at Design Village Bangna, on the eastern side of the city.

Monocle, visiting in early 2024, gave the brand 17 branches and described its service rituals: each morning staff line up at the end of the aisles to greet the first shoppers with a “sawadee,” and a “you hunt, we cook” scheme lets chefs prepare dishes from ingredients customers pick in the store. The magazine quoted Ploychompu Umpujh, who led Gourmet Market and the food department at The Mall Group, on the role of service in food retail.

Design and documentation.

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.

One word that carries a family of formats.

Gourmet Market’s naming is its most visible design system. The word “Gourmet” leads every format the reports describe — Gourmet Market, Gourmet to Go and Gourmet Thai — and Monocle’s 2024 portrait of the team lists further units under the same prefix, including Gourmet Eats and Gourmet Fresh. One English word therefore signals the parent brand while a second word sets the format: a full supermarket, a quick food shop, or a shop of Thai products for visitors. Its Thai-language website, at gourmetmarketthailand.com, gives the name in Thai script as กูร์เมต์ มาร์เก็ต.

The brand’s settings carry much of its identity. Its stores sit inside the group’s own centres — the Emporium, EmQuartier, Siam Paragon and The Mall Lifestores — and inside other developers’ projects such as Terminal 21 Asok and The Promenade, according to English Wikipedia. The Lat Phrao store sits in an underground railway station; the Design Village stores sit in community malls. The stores now range from food halls in upscale malls to a supermarket in a station.

Two name traps are worth noting. Gourmet Market is not connected with Gourmet Burger Kitchen, the British burger restaurant chain, and it is not related to the independent delicatessens and grocers in other countries that also trade as “Gourmet Market.” Nor is it the department-store business itself: The Mall Group’s malls and its supermarket share an owner but carry different names. The brand’s logo, typeface and colours are not documented in the sources used here, so the palette in this guide is our own.

For a design guide, Gourmet Market shows how a department-store group can build a food brand from one English word and then stretch it across formats and locations. Compare Foodland, another Bangkok supermarket name, and Cold Storage, a long-running supermarket brand in Singapore. For this guide we use a deep herb green, a rice cream and an old brass with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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