New World Brand Guidelines: Foodstuffs’ Full-Service Banner From Milford, 1964

Milford, June 1964.

New World is the full-service supermarket banner of Foodstuffs, the New Zealand grocery co-operatives that also run Pak’nSave and Four Square. Its stores are independently owned and run by owner-operators within one of the two Foodstuffs co-operatives, North Island and South Island. English Wikipedia dates the banner to 1963, describing it as Foodstuffs’ first American-style full-service supermarket brand and the second such brand in New Zealand, after Foodtown.

The first store to carry the name in full came a year later. The trade magazine Supermarket News reported in June 2024, as the brand marked sixty years, that the first fully branded New World opened in Milford, on Auckland’s North Shore, on 6 June 1964, as part of the Foodstuffs Auckland co-operative. It was owned by Allen Hill and Charlie Coldicutt, the magazine said, and still trades from its original site on Kitchener Road, renovated in 2014 to double its original footprint. By 1966, 11 stores in Auckland traded under the banner, and the name later spread to the other Foodstuffs co-operatives across both islands.

The name has two origin stories, both reported by the same magazine. Before New World existed, some Four Square supermarkets used the strapline “a New World of shopping” in their advertising, and the chief executive of Foodstuffs North Island told Supermarket News in February 2020 that the brand evolved out of that Four Square promotion. A June 2024 piece in the magazine added that the name was brought back from Australia by Russell Thomas, then chief executive of Foodstuffs Christchurch, where G. J. Coles was using “New World” for its supermarkets around the turn of the 1960s. New World’s own head of marketing told the magazine that the exact reasons for the brand’s birth are unknown, and suggested that the spread of American-style supermarkets in the 1950s and 1960s, with a far wider range under one roof than the corner grocer, probably shaped how the banner developed.

Double-branded for years.

For its early years New World did not stand alone. According to Supermarket News, Foodstuffs’ New World supermarkets were double-branded for some 16 or 17 years, carrying the Four Square logo and running both Four Square and New World specials. The magazine places the brand in a wider change in New Zealand shopping: it says Foodtown opened the country’s first full-fledged supermarket at Otahuhu in June 1958, while Foodstuffs claimed to have opened a small one-stop Four Square “supermarket” at Belmont, on the North Shore, in November 1957.

The banner later split into formats. English Wikipedia says New World Metro, a smaller format for central-city sites, opened its first store in Wellington’s central business district in 2002, and that New World Fresh Collective, small Auckland stores focused on fresh produce, premium products and meal kits, began at Mairangi Bay in 2017. In February 2020 Supermarket News reported that the opening of New World Pukekohe made 100 New World stores in the North Island and 143 nationwide; English Wikipedia gives more than 140 as of December 2021.

The magazine’s 2020 report also traced how the stores changed over half a century. Car parks grew as cars became more common, and spaces became wider; refrigeration and air conditioning became standard; computerised stock control and checkouts replaced the price label gun; uniforms changed with fashion; and self-checkouts and online ordering followed. Its 2024 report pointed to in-store butcheries and bakeries, where the stores train apprentices, and to local owner-operators who shape each store’s range to its community.

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.

The red and black NW diamond.

The visual mark is a red and black “NW” diamond, as Supermarket News described it in June 2024. The palette here takes only that pairing as a starting point; the tones are our own.

New World sits inside the same co-operative structure as Pak’nSave. English Wikipedia traces Foodstuffs to 1922, when Auckland grocers formed a co-operative buying group; the Auckland and Wellington companies merged as Foodstuffs North Island, trading from 1 September 2013, alongside the separate Foodstuffs South Island. When the two sought clearance to merge into one national co-operative, the Commerce Commission declined it on 1 October 2024, saying the merger would substantially lessen competition, RNZ reported.

Loyalty schemes have moved with the group. English Wikipedia says New World took part in the Fly Buys programme from its start in September 1996 until October 2024, ran its own Clubcard from 2014 in the South Island and from 2016 in the North Island, and that in May 2026 Foodstuffs announced Club+, a programme shared with Pak’nSave and Four Square, in which shoppers earn Club+ dollars that can be redeemed at any Foodstuffs store. Its house brand is Pams, which the same source dates to 1937.

The name is shared with unrelated businesses: New World is not connected with New World Development, the Hong Kong property group, and the Australian supermarkets that G. J. Coles once ran under the name were a separate business.

For a design guide, New World shows a co-operative banner built from a borrowed strapline and a simple two-letter monogram. Compare Pak’nSave, Foodstuffs’ warehouse-style banner, and Coles, the Australian grocer whose supermarkets used the New World name, Supermarket News says. For this guide we use a deep red and a near-black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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