Spencer’s Brand Guidelines: A Mount Road Name From 1863, Now RP-Sanjiv Goenka’s Grocer

A shop in Madras, an Indo-Saracenic store and a long gap in the story.

Spencer’s began as a single shop in Madras. According to The News Minute, writing in August 2016, the business was established in 1863 by Charles Durant and J. W. Spencer on Mount Road, the avenue now called Anna Salai, in what was then the Madras Presidency. The company’s own heritage page agrees on the year and confirms that there really was a Mr Spencer, giving his full name as John William Spencer.

The property belonged to Spencer & Co Ltd, which, The News Minute says, opened the first department store in the Indian subcontinent in 1895, with more than 80 departments. A later owner, Eugene Oakshott, moved the store into a new building in the Indo-Saracenic style; the paper names its architect as W. N. Pogson, and quotes a 1914 survey, Southern India: Its History, People, Commerce, and Industrial Resources, describing a walk through an “almost interminable succession” of finely fitted and decorated rooms. The present Spencer Plaza shopping centre stands on the same Mount Road site and opened in 1991, according to the same report, which described it in 2016 as India’s oldest shopping mall.

The company describes how far the name once travelled: at one time, it says, the Spencer’s network ran from Peshawar to Cochin and from Karachi to Chittagong, across undivided India. It says the business passed into Indian ownership in the 1960s.

The next owner shaped what Spencer’s is today. The RPSG Group’s own history says that Rama Prasad Goenka founded RPG Enterprises in 1979 and that the group’s acquisitions in 1989 included CESC, the Kolkata power company, and “Spencer’s, the retail” business. The RPSG Group in its present form was set up in 2011, the group says, and Spencer’s Retail sits within it as the consumer-retail arm of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, headquartered in Kolkata.

Foodworld, Giant and the return of the Spencer’s name.

The modern supermarket chain grew out of a joint venture. In 1995, the company says, RPG Enterprises launched Foodworld with the Hong Kong-based Dairy Farm International, running supermarkets as Foodworld and hypermarkets as Giant. The venture ended in 2006; RPG kept 48 of the 93 stores, refurbished them and reopened them under the Spencer’s name. English Wikipedia adds that Spencer’s grew quickly between 2006 and 2009 and at one point had more than 300 stores, before a period of consolidation that closed weaker branches.

English Wikipedia describes Spencer’s as a “food first” retailer: most outlets sell fresh and packaged food, and many add clothing, home goods and electronics. It lists two main formats, the neighbourhood store called Spencer’s and the larger Spencer’s Hyper, and says the chain opened a 72,000-square-foot store at Kolkata’s South City Mall in 2008. In 2015 it bought the online grocer Meragrocer.

Own labels are a large part of the shelf. English Wikipedia names Smart Choice for everyday groceries such as juices, noodles, biscuits and honey, Clean Home for household products, Tasty Wonders for snacks and Maroon for cookware, plastics and foils. The company’s website adds an in-house fashion label, 2Bme, with clothing for men, women and children, and in-store sections it calls Spencer’s Gourmet, Patisserie, Wine & Liquor and Epicuisine.

How Indian chains present themselves.

India’s large store chains present themselves in quite different ways, and the differences start with where the stores stand. Department-store groups have long followed the shopping mall: afaqs! reported in 2019 that Shoppers Stop had opened a 50,000-square-foot store in Gurugram stocked with premium labels. DMart took the opposite route, Outlook Business reported in 2022, owning the land under its standalone supermarkets rather than leasing space in malls.

The festival calendar shapes the year for these retailers. Shoppers Stop’s first general manager writes in his memoir that the team hurried to name and open the original Andheri store in 1991 so that it could trade before Diwali. Advertising matters as much as the calendar: when Shoppers Stop changed its logo in 2008, afaqs! reported, the new identity arrived with seven commercials, a press campaign and outdoor posters, with creative work by Contract Advertising.

Own labels are a second thread. In August 2025 Indian Retailer reported that Shoppers Stop’s private brands and its value-fashion format, Intune, were growing alongside the third-party brands in its department stores; Forbes India wrote in 2017 that DMart meant to work harder on private labels of its own. Names are often simple phrases: Shoppers Stop’s, the same memoir says, was suggested by a supermarket name seen in Boston.

Most of the larger chains also keep corporate pages that set out their founders, parent groups and stock-exchange listings, since several trade on the BSE and NSE in Mumbai. This guide uses those pages alongside dated press, and marks clearly where a fact rests on the company’s own word.

Nature’s Basket, then a narrower map.

The chain’s biggest recent purchase took it west. In May 2019, The News Minute reported that Spencer’s Retail was taking over Godrej’s Nature’s Basket, a gourmet food chain with 36 stores in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Pune, giving the Kolkata company a presence in western India. English Wikipedia says the acquisition was completed on 4 July 2019. By June 2023, DT Next reported, the group was running 34 stores under the Nature’s Basket name alongside its own.

Since then the map has shrunk. In September 2023, DT Next and Apparel Resources reported that Spencer’s would close 10 loss-making stores in Tamil Nadu by the end of that month, saying that, as of 30 June 2023, it operated 152 Spencer’s stores with a combined trading area of 13.29 lakh square feet; English Wikipedia gives 160 stores, on a standalone basis, as of 30 June 2019. In August 2024, the Visakhapatnam news site Yo! Vizag reported that the chain was closing its stores across Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and the Delhi-NCR area, including all nine in Visakhapatnam by October 2024, after an earlier retreat from Tamil Nadu and Kerala in 2023, and that it was shifting its focus to West Bengal and eastern Uttar Pradesh. Those closures took the chain out of the southern states where, English Wikipedia says, it began trading as a retail chain in the early 1990s.

As of November 2026, the company’s website says Spencer’s runs more than 125 stores in more than 35 cities; that figure is the company’s own and is not dated on the page. Spencer’s Retail Limited remains part of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, which also owns CESC, and its stores now sit mainly in the east of the country, close to the group’s Kolkata base.

For a design guide, Spencer’s shows how an old shop name can be carried by a much newer business: a grocery chain rebuilt in 2006 under a name first used on Mount Road in 1863. Compare More, another supermarket chain that changed owners, and Big Bazaar. For this guide we use a deep teal, cream and a brick red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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