Pak’nSave Brand Guidelines: Foodstuffs’ 1985 Kaitaia Food Barn and Stickman

Kaitaia, June 1985.

Pak’nSave is the warehouse-style supermarket banner of Foodstuffs, the New Zealand grocery co-operatives that also run New World and Four Square. English Wikipedia dates the first store to 12 June 1985 in Kaitaia, a town in the Far North District of the North Island, and the Northern Advocate, a regional title of the New Zealand Herald, told the story of that opening in August 2015, as the store marked thirty years.

According to that report, Foodstuffs approached Gaylene Voss and her husband, who had been running a Four Square store in Whangārei, to open the Kaitaia store. Building began in January and the doors opened in June. Foodstuffs already had stores called Mark ’N Pak in Rotorua and Whangārei, the paper said, and the small Far North town was chosen to test whether a large bulk “food barn” would work there, on the expectation that larger families would travel for lower prices.

The early store was basic. There were no barcodes, scanners or rolling checkouts; prices were marked on the shelves, and shoppers were handed a black marker at the door to write the price on each item before taking it to the till. Ms Voss told the paper the system did not last: the markers ran dry, and some customers drew on the walls or took the pens home. Mutton and candles sold heavily, she said, because many homes in the Far North still had no power in 1985, and communities organised buses from Rawene and elsewhere for a monthly shopping day. Local dairies used the store as a wholesaler. It also opened on Saturdays and later on Sundays, which, she recalled, did not please other local retailers or the town’s churches at first. Staff numbers grew from 17 at opening to 125 when the couple sold the business in 1997, the year Foodstuffs moved the store to North Road, where it still traded at the time of the 2015 article.

Stickman in a yellow world.

The banner spread quickly. A second store opened in Henderson, in West Auckland, a few months after Kaitaia, English Wikipedia says; it counts 20 stores in 1993, 30 in 1998 and 37 in 2005, seven of them in Auckland. Each store is franchised and run by an owner-operator, and supplied by its Foodstuffs co-operative.

The format has stayed plain. English Wikipedia describes large stores with a no-frills feel, often with unlined interiors and concrete floors, and with surplus stock stacked above the shelves on the pallets it arrived on, so that the shop floor doubles as storage. A hand-held scanning service, Shop’nGo, started in a few stores around 2005, and self-checkouts began appearing around 2009. The first Pak’nSave Fuel site opened beside the Tamatea store in December 2002. In September 2017 a supermarket in Levin was rebranded as the first Pak’nSave Mini, a smaller format with about 2,500 products against roughly 8,000 in a standard store, according to the same source.

The brand’s public face is Stickman. In June 2018 the New Zealand Herald marked ten years of the character, which debuted in 2008. He was created at the advertising agency FCB by the creatives Billy McQueen and Chris Schofield: a faceless black stick figure walking through a yellow world. The early ads did not have him speak; the comedian Paul Ego narrated instead, and at a point that is disputed even within FCB, the paper said, Ego became the character’s own voice, in a nasal drawl that is widely imitated. By 2018 about 30 different creatives had written his lines, and the ads could be turned around quickly to comment on topical events.

English Wikipedia notes that the black-on-yellow scheme has occasionally been reversed, including during the 2011 Rugby World Cup and the 2012 Summer Olympics, and that Stickman hosted an hour-long radio show in December 2022 under a stage name.

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.

A co-operative’s warehouse banner.

Pak’nSave belongs to a split co-operative structure. English Wikipedia traces Foodstuffs to 1922, when grocers in Auckland formed a co-operative buying group, with similar groups set up in Wellington the same year, in Christchurch in 1928 and in Dunedin in 1948. The Auckland and Wellington companies merged as Foodstuffs North Island, trading from 1 September 2013, alongside the separate Foodstuffs South Island.

In 2024 the two sought clearance to combine into one national co-operative. On 1 October 2024 the Commerce Commission declined it, saying the merger would substantially lessen competition and would cut the number of buyers of grocery products in New Zealand from three to two, RNZ reported that day.

Shoppers meet the banner through the same systems as its sister brands. English Wikipedia says Foodstuffs announced a shared Club+ loyalty programme in May 2026, usable across Pak’nSave, New World and Four Square, and Foodstuffs’ own label, Pams, is sold across its stores. The name is styled by the company as PAK’nSAVE, with the capitals broken by a lower-case “n”.

For a design guide, Pak’nSave shows how a single drawn character and one strong colour pairing can carry a plain retail format for years. Compare New World, the full-service Foodstuffs banner, and Woolworths, the Australian group behind New Zealand’s other major supermarket chain. For this guide we use a warm yellow and a near-black with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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