Kiwi Brand Guidelines: The Hokksund Grocer Named From Two Surnames and Painted Green

Two grocers, a small store and a borrowed idea.

Kiwi began as a single grocery store in Hokksund, a town in the Drammen region west of Oslo. The company’s own history gives the date as Thursday 15 March 1979, when two grocers opened a 170-square-metre shop on Stasjonsgata. The Norwegian encyclopedia Store norske leksikon, in its article on NorgesGruppen (revised in October 2026), confirms that the chain opened its first store in Hokksund, in what was then the county of Buskerud, in 1979, and says it was a low-price chain from the start that first grew into a large regional chain around Drammen.

The name is a compound. The company says the founders, Tor Kirkeng and Svein Wike, built it from the first two letters of their surnames: Ki from Kirkeng and Wi from Wike. Norwegian Wikipedia gives the same explanation. Kirkeng was 26 when the store opened, the company says; he had grown up in his family’s grocery at Geilo and worked in his uncle Henning’s Nærkjøp store in Lier, while Wike ran a Nærkjøp store at Konnerud. The company credits the uncle with helping the pair start the business.

The idea came from Germany. According to the company, Kirkeng read about Aldi in 1977 — a chain of fixed prices, a short range and little service — and decided to bring the format to Norway. The first Hokksund store was the test. A second followed in Mjøndalen in 1981, and the company lists the first eight stores, all in the Drammen region, opening between 1979 and 1986 in places including Konnerud, Heggedal and Krokstadelva.

Kirkeng became sole owner in 1989, the company says, and in 1991 he brought in the grocer Per-Erik Burud, who had run a Spar 1000 store, as head of the chain. Kirkeng moved to new projects and store growth, working from the chain’s office at Vitbank in Lier.

A colour chosen from the local papers.

Kiwi’s identity has a documented origin story, told by the company itself. The founders devised the name, the logo and the colours on their own. To choose a colour, the company says, Tor Kirkeng leafed through the local newspapers of the Drammen area to see which colours businesses used most in their advertising and company profiles. Green hardly appeared. For a newcomer that wanted to stand apart, the choice was simple, the company says: it had to be green.

That decision shaped the first store. The walls had green stripes at the top, and the rest was papered with green price posters, according to the company’s account. Green has stayed with the chain since; the company’s 2019 environmental flagship in Hokksund, opened on 15 August 2019 to mark forty years since the first store, was named KIWI Lerberg, and the company says it was built with low-carbon concrete, solid-timber walls and a self-supporting timber roof.

The chain writes its own name in capitals as KIWI; English Wikipedia notes the stylisation, and Norwegian Wikipedia uses it too. The company’s wordmark and exact typeface are not documented in the sources used here, so this guide does not reproduce or describe them in detail.

Other parts of the identity are programmes rather than graphics. The company says it set up an internal training school, KIWIskolen, in 1996, and gave it its own building at Lierstranda, next to the chain’s service office, in 2010. In 2016 it launched KIWI PLUSS, a loyalty programme linked to the Trumf bonus scheme used across NorgesGruppen. According to the company, the first Kiwi television advertisements ran in 1997, with the chain’s then chief as the face of the campaigns.

Kiwi also sells the private labels of its parent group. Norwegian Wikipedia names First Price, Eldorado, Fiskemannen and Unik among the lower-priced brands used across NorgesGruppen’s chains; the company says First Price was launched in autumn 2003, developed with NorgesGruppen and its private-label company Unil.

Design and documentation.

Europe’s supermarket, discount and variety chains show themselves first through the shop sign. A short name, a monogram or a block of colour has to work on a high-street fascia, a carrier bag, a trolley and a staff uniform at once. When Rewe renamed its Austrian Merkur stores Billa Plus in April 2021, the Austrian broadcaster ORF listed exactly those items — logos, shop fronts, bags and work clothing — as the things to be changed over. Albert Heijn’s lower-case “ah” monogram has been used since 1966.

Own-label packaging carries the identity onto the shelf. Chains name their ranges in their own words, from organic lines to entry labels and delicatessen ranges, and heritage archives such as the Stichting Albert Heijn Erfgoed foundation keep older packs that show how those labels looked decades ago. A change of colour or logo usually reaches packs, shelves, store interiors and campaigns in stages, as Billa’s yellow-and-white scheme did in the Czech Republic from 2024.

Formats and networks are part of the picture too. Many chains run several store types under one name — a neighbourhood supermarket, a larger flagship, a convenience shop at a station or filling station, and home delivery — and publish their store and country counts on their own corporate pages. Those counts change often, so this guide gives each one with the date of its source.

Ownership varies widely. Some chains still carry a founder’s name; others belong to listed retail groups, to family holdings or to co-operatives owned by their members or retailers, and several have been bought, merged or renamed over the decades. Corporate pages on founders, owners and retail groups set out those structures, and each guide here states them as dated facts, separating what independent sources record from what the companies say about themselves.

From one store to a national chain.

Kiwi did not stay independent. In 1993, the company says, it was sold to the wholesaler ASKO Drammen, which was owned by Joh. Johannson, the Oslo wholesale house whose business Store norske leksikon traces back to 1866; the Kiwi team stayed at its head office in Lier. In 1994 the chain took over 31 franchise stores in Hedmark and Oppland that had left another chain, the company says, taking Kiwi from 23 stores to 71 within the year. At the end of 1994 it became part of the newly formed NorgesGruppen.

Store norske leksikon describes that structure. An umbrella organisation called NorgesGruppen AS was formed in 1994 by Joh. Johannson and more than fifteen independent grocery chains, and in 2000 it merged with Joh. Johannson to create NorgesGruppen ASA. The encyclopedia says the group’s many chain concepts were later consolidated into three “profile houses” running Meny, Kiwi and Spar/Joker, that Kiwi is the biggest of the group’s chains, and that the Johannson family is the main owner. It also lists Kiwi, with Extra and Rema 1000, as examples of the Norwegian low-price supermarket format in its article on grocery stores.

The company gives a timeline of growth by store number: the 100th store in Arendal in 1996, the 200th in 1999, the 500th in Volda in 2011, the 600th in Sokna in 2014 and the 700th in Bergen in 2023. Norwegian Wikipedia gives 652 stores as of February 2018. Kiwi’s head office remains in Lier, and Norwegian Wikipedia says Vegard Kjuus has led the chain since 1 January 2025.

Kiwi also tried Denmark. Norwegian Wikipedia says the first Danish stores opened in 2008. English Wikipedia describes Kiwi in Denmark as a joint venture between NorgesGruppen and the Danish wholesaler Dagrofa. In May 2017 the trade title European Supermarket Magazine reported that Dagrofa had announced the closure of the Kiwi discount chain in Denmark, with around 30 of its 103 stores to be converted to Spar and Meny and the rest to close. Norwegian Wikipedia dates the closure of all Danish Kiwi stores to 28 April 2017.

For a design guide, Kiwi shows how a single colour decision, made by reading the local papers, can carry a grocery chain from one store to several hundred. Compare Rema 1000, which Store norske leksikon cites with Kiwi as a Norwegian low-price supermarket, and Aldi, the German format that the company says inspired Kiwi. For this guide we use shelf green, forest ink and a leaf green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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