Tops Brand Guidelines: The Central and Ahold Supermarket Name Behind Tops Daily

A Central and Ahold venture of the mid-1990s.

Tops is the supermarket brand of Central Food Retail (CFR), the grocery business of Central Retail Corporation, which belongs to Thailand’s Central Group. The brand began as a joint venture between Central and the Dutch grocer Royal Ahold. English Wikipedia says the company was established in 1996 as CRC Ahold Co., Ltd., bringing together the supermarket businesses of Robinson Department Store and Central Group, with Ahold holding a 49 per cent stake. The trade title FoodNavigator, writing in March 2004, dated the creation of Ahold’s Thai joint venture to 1997; the two sources give different years.

The name came from the United States. English Wikipedia says the stores were renamed Tops Supermarket after Tops Markets, the American supermarket chain that Ahold owned at the time, although the Thai stores did not take over the American chain’s red diamond logo. The first Thai branch opened on Royal City Avenue in Bangkok. Robinson then sold its shares in the venture to Ahold in two steps, in December 1996 and in 1998, English Wikipedia says, leaving the business as a partnership between Ahold and Central.

Central brought long retail experience to the venture. English Wikipedia says Central Group was founded in 1947 by Tiang and Samrit Chirathivat, who opened a shop near the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok that year, and that the family opened Central Department Store in 1956, in the Wang Burapa area of Phra Nakhon, the old centre of Bangkok. Central Group remains privately owned by the Chirathivat family, and Central Retail, the arm that holds the food business, is one of its publicly traded subsidiaries.

Thailand was the first Asian market that Ahold entered, FoodNavigator reported in 2004. The Dutch company went on to Indonesia and Malaysia, and sold those two operations in early 2003, to the Hero and Dairy Farm groups respectively, a year before it sold the Thai business.

The Thai Tops and the American Tops Markets share a name because of their one-time common owner, but they have been separate businesses since Ahold left Thailand in 2004.

Back under Central.

Ahold left Asia in 2004. On 4 March 2004 FoodNavigator reported that Ahold had sold its stake in CRC Ahold to its partner, the Central Group, bringing a six-year Asian venture to an end. At the time, the report said, CRC Ahold ran 47 stores and a wholesale business supplying some 300 convenience stores in Thailand; the price was not disclosed.

The same year brought more shops under the name. English Wikipedia says Central converted about 20 former Food Lion stores to Tops in 2004, after their Belgian parent, Delhaize Group, closed its Thai supermarket operations.

Over time the Tops name spread across several sizes of shop. English Wikipedia lists Tops Daily, a convenience format of 100 to 200 square metres; Tops Food Hall, a premium supermarket; Tops Fine Food, a higher-tier supermarket; and Tops Plaza, a shopping-centre format whose first branch, in Phichit, opened on 22 December 2017. Tops Plaza centres put a Tops supermarket under one roof with a department store and cinemas, English Wikipedia says.

The brand was then tidied into one name. In October 2022 the Bangkok Post reported that Central Retail had restructured its food businesses for the first time in its 26 years of operation, bringing all of its retail food brands under CFR as the single brand Tops. The paper also noted two new store models under the food business, Tops Fine Food and Tops Club. In July 2026 the Bangkok Post reported that CFR had expanded its Tops Food Hall at Central Northville, a mall in Nonthaburi province.

Hypermarkets and supermarkets.

Department stores and hypermarkets in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia are usually met inside a larger building. Many sit as anchor tenants in shopping malls, so the store name appears twice: on the fascia above the entrance and again on the mall directory, the car-park signs and the shopping bags carried through the concourse. Some groups also run the malls themselves, which lets one family of names cover both the centre and the store inside it.

The calendar shapes much of what customers see. Retailers in the region publish their own campaigns around Chinese New Year, Hari Raya, Songkran, Deepavali, Christmas and year-end sales, and the store name is often paired with a seasonal theme for a few weeks before returning to its everyday colours. Shopping bags, price tags and in-store signs carry the same palette, so a chain’s colours can be read from across a mall.

Own-label ranges and loyalty programmes extend the name beyond the fascia. Several groups publish house brands for groceries, clothing or homeware, and many describe member cards and apps that collect points across the group’s stores. Store naming is usually plain: a chain name followed by the mall or district, so that a branch is known by its location as much as by its owner.

Corporate pages fill in the rest. Most of these companies set out their founders, founding dates, parent groups and stock-exchange listings on their own investor or corporate sites, and the national business press records acquisitions, renamings and closures as they happen. The guides in this set draw on those dated records and describe each name as its owner and the press present it.

One name across formats.

The convenience side of the brand grew through a change of partner. Central had run FamilyMart convenience stores in Thailand under franchise from the Japanese chain. In August 2023 The Nation reported that Central Retail was rebranding its Family Mart stores as Tops Daily, a shift it had begun gradually in August 2022, and that the Family Mart franchise rights in Thailand ran to the end of 2023. English Wikipedia says the franchise agreement ended in 2023.

The Nation linked the move to a wider trend among convenience operators towards larger shops with parking, seating and a broader range of services, in place of the typical small convenience store of about 150 square metres, and noted that Central had earlier gathered Tops Market, Tops Daily and Tops Online under a single Tops model. The convenience shops, the supermarkets and the food halls now share one word on their signs, with a second word to tell the formats apart.

Tops started as a name borrowed from an American sister chain inside a Dutch and Thai venture, became a wholly Thai-owned brand in 2004, and since 2022 has been the single name for Central’s food retail, from a Tops Daily corner shop to a Tops Food Hall in a large mall.

For a design guide, Tops shows how one short name can stretch across a convenience shop, a supermarket and a food hall. Compare Central Department Store, the department-store chain of the same parent group, and Robinson, whose supermarket business went into the original venture. For this guide we use a tomato red, a warm cream and a charcoal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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