Super Indo Brand Guidelines: Gelael Stores, a 1997 Delhaize–Salim Venture and a Lion

A split supermarket partnership and a Belgian partner.

Super Indo grew out of another supermarket business. Indonesian Wikipedia says Gelael Supermarket, which it dates to 1955 and counts among the early modern retailers in Indonesia, took capital from the Salim Group in 1990, and that the two worked together in supermarkets from 1992. The partnership did not last. On 31 March 1997, according to the same source, the Gelael side and Salim parted ways, and the 18 Gelael supermarkets then trading in cities including Jakarta, Batam, Bandung, Semarang and Solo were split between them, nine each.

Salim found a new partner in Delhaize Group, the Belgian supermarket company. Indonesian Wikipedia says Delhaize bought 51 per cent of the new business in 1997. Kompas, writing in December 2025 and citing the company’s own website, describes PT Lion Super Indo as a joint venture between Ahold Delhaize and its local partner, the Salim Group, with Ahold Delhaize holding 51 per cent and Salim 49 per cent. Kompas also says some of the former Gelael stores held by Salim were renamed Superindo once the partnership with Delhaize began.

The chain opened in August 1997. On the size of that start the sources differ: Kompas says the joint venture began with 10 stores, while Indonesian Wikipedia says Salim’s nine former Gelael stores were converted and three new ones added, for 12 stores at opening. Both agree on the year and the month. The operating company is PT Lion Super Indo; The Jakarta Post, in August 2016, called it a retail subsidiary of the Salim Group and named the operator of the Indomaret minimarkets, PT Indomarco Prismatama, as its sister company.

A Dutch-Belgian parent, a Java network and a compact franchise.

The foreign half of the venture changed its own shape in the 2010s. The Jakarta Post reported in August 2016 that Delhaize Group and the Dutch retailer Royal Ahold had announced their merger in June 2015 and completed it the month before the article, in July 2016, creating Ahold Delhaize, the company that now holds the majority stake in Super Indo; the paper put the merged group at more than 6,500 stores around the world at that time. Ahold Delhaize lists Super Indo among its local brands.

Kompas describes the format as a modern supermarket placed close to residential neighbourhoods, built around fresh food for the household, with fruit, vegetables, fish and meat as its main draw. The store network is concentrated in Java and the southern part of Sumatra, Indonesian Wikipedia says. The Jakarta Post counted 136 supermarkets in August 2016 and noted that the 130th had opened in March that year at a Courts Megastore in Bekasi, with about 1,207 square metres of space. Indonesian Wikipedia gives 234 stores as of 1 August 2024, including six franchised stores, and Kompas wrote in December 2025 that the chain had more than 200 stores in 40 cities across eight provinces.

In 2016 the company added a smaller format. The Jakarta Post reported that Super Indo had begun selling franchises for Lion Express, a compact store of about 500 square metres carrying the full Super Indo range, and described it as the first supermarket operator in Indonesia to franchise a compact version of its stores. Ahold Delhaize says the first Lion Express opened in South Jakarta. By 2024 Indonesian Wikipedia was listing the franchised stores under the name Super Indo Express.

Design and documentation.

Supermarket and convenience chains across East and South-East Asia present themselves through a few fixed things: the name on the sign, the colours of the fascia and the carrier bag, the layout of the shop floor and the names of their own-label ranges. In Japan, Kobe Bussan’s Gyomu Super has built a recognisable store out of logistics, stacking fast-selling goods in the cardboard boxes they arrive in, a practice Japanese Wikipedia calls “hakochin”.

Names and signs do not always travel unchanged. FRIDAY DIGITAL reported in December 2024 that Gyomu Super stores are called “Gyomu Super” in Hong Kong but “GYOMU Japan” in Vietnam and Malaysia, where Japanese text cannot be shown on the sign. Chains in Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore make similar choices about script, language and lettering, and this guide describes them as each company or a dated source shows them.

Ownership is often layered. Some chains are run directly by a listed retail group; others are franchised, licensed to local partners or held inside a larger conglomerate with interests far beyond food. Gyomu Super, for example, is almost entirely a franchise network: Japanese Wikipedia says that only three of its 1,007 stores were company-run at the end of October 2022. Where a chain has changed hands, this guide gives the buyer and the date from a dated source, and describes any deal not completed as pending.

Store counts, formats and own-label ranges are given in the companies’ own terms and with their dates, because networks change quickly. Founders, owners and retail groups are named as the companies’ 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 borrowed emblem and two house brands.

The most visible link to the parent company is on the sign. Kompas wrote in December 2025 that, as the controlling shareholder, Delhaize’s characteristic lion appears on the Super Indo logo, and noted that Delhaize stores in Western Europe are easy to recognise by that lion. The lion also gives the operating company its name, PT Lion Super Indo, and gave the compact franchise its first name, Lion Express.

The other identity carriers are the own labels. Indonesian Wikipedia says the private brand 365 was launched in 2006 and has grown to more than 140 kinds of product. The company explains the name as a year of everyday value, 365 days, and says the range covers family staples such as rice, sugar, tempura prawns, tissue and drinking water, sold only in Super Indo stores. In August 2016 The Jakarta Post reported a second label, Indoculinaire, for regional foods made with small and medium-sized producers from across Indonesia; the paper named Toraja coffee from South Sulawesi, teng-teng peanut snacks and instant nasi liwet from East Java among the first of at least 60 products for the label, and the range still appears on the company’s own-brand page.

The names of the formats follow the same pattern. The compact franchise launched in 2016 carried the Lion name, and by 2024 Indonesian Wikipedia was listing the franchised stores under the Super Indo name itself. Super Indo’s own-brand page also presents a range of reusable shopping bags alongside 365 and Indoculinaire.

For a design guide, Super Indo shows how a joint venture can carry one partner’s emblem and the other’s home market in a single sign. Compare Indomaret, the Salim Group minimarket chain run by Super Indo’s sister company, and Hypermart, the Lippo Group’s hypermarket chain. For this guide we use a market red, a lion gold and a rice white with a sturdy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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