An Idaho store, a Miami grocery and a family of brothers.

Winn-Dixie’s story starts far from Florida. The Jacksonville Daily Record, in a company timeline it published in October 2025 and has kept updating, says that in 1913 Carl Davis began working at the Clark Mercantile, a general store in Burley, Idaho, and was soon joined by his brother William Milton (W.M.) Davis; in 1914 W.M. Davis bought the store and renamed it the Davis Mercantile.

The move south came in 1925. On the paper’s timeline, W.M. Davis, on his brother Carl’s advice, decided to open a business in Florida and, with a loan from his father, bought the Rockmoor Grocery in Miami. His sons Artemus Darius (A.D.), James Elsworth (J.E.), Austin and Tine were stockholders. The Tampa Bay Times, in a history published in August 2023, gives the same purchase, “according to newspaper archives.”

The family renamed the business Table Supply. The Jacksonville Daily Record dates the change to 1927, when the family also opened more stores and bought a chain called Lively Stores, spreading Table Supply across southern Florida from Miami to Tampa. In 1934 the Davis sons took charge of Table Supply, the timeline says, and the Tampa Bay Times names A.D. Davis and James E. Davis as the brothers who built the business from there.

The next name came from a rival. In 1939, according to the Jacksonville Daily Record, Bill Lovett, head of the Winn & Lovett grocery chain, persuaded the Davis brothers to buy a majority of his company. In 1944 the brothers adopted the Winn & Lovett name and chose Jacksonville as the headquarters for their growing network of stores. In 1952 Winn & Lovett listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker WIN, the paper says.

Too many names, then one.

By the early 1950s the family had a naming problem. The Tampa Bay Times reported in 2023 that the company had absorbed so many chains, including Piggly Wiggly and Kwik Chek stores, that it struggled to keep track of its own banners. “When we merged with a chain we felt that it had a good name and we tried to keep it,” A.D. Davis told the St. Petersburg Times in 1958, as quoted by the Tampa Bay Times; he added that shareholders visiting from elsewhere sometimes did not know which company they owned.

The answer was a compound name. In 1955 the brothers bought the Dixie Home Stores chain and merged the two names to form Winn-Dixie Stores, Inc., the Tampa Bay Times reported; the Jacksonville Daily Record gives the same year and says the Winn & Lovett name was changed with that acquisition. The other stores were gradually rebranded under the new name, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

The name travelled with the stores. The Jacksonville Daily Record records that the company bought City Markets stores in the Bahamas in 1967, opened division offices and distribution centres in Charlotte, Orlando and Fort Worth between 1973 and 1976, and opened a Winn-Dixie Marketplace store in Valdosta, Georgia, in 1984. The Davis family stayed at the top: A. Dano Davis, J.E. Davis’s son, became president in 1982, and R.D. Davis, A.D. Davis’s son, became vice chairman the next year and chairman the year after, the paper says.

Winn-Dixie’s predecessors rose with the arrival of the supermarket, the Tampa historian Rodney Kite-Powell told the Tampa Bay Times in 2023, describing the supermarket as a place where shoppers no longer had to visit a separate butcher, fishmonger, greengrocer and bakery: “It’s like a mall for food.”

Design and documentation.

A grocery or pharmacy brand is read in motion, from a car park, a pavement or the end of an aisle, so its identity has to work at several distances at once. The fascia above the entrance carries the name at the largest scale, usually as a lettered sign, a lit channel letter or a panel that has to hold up in daylight and after dark. Inside, the same name shrinks onto aisle markers, department headers and shelf-edge strips, where legibility and a consistent colour code matter more than flourish.

The carrier bag is the piece of the identity that leaves the building, and it tends to repeat the logo in one or two flat colours that print cleanly on film or paper. Own-label packaging is a separate task again: the retailer’s name or a sub-brand has to sit alongside product photography, ingredient panels and regulatory text without crowding them. Mascots, where a chain has one, often travel across all of these surfaces, from the sign to the receipt. When studying a retail identity, it helps to look at each surface in turn and note which elements stay fixed and which are allowed to change.

A name that outlasted its owners.

The family era ended in the 2000s. Winn-Dixie filed for Chapter 11 reorganisation on 21 February 2005, a process the Jacksonville Daily Record says ended the Davis family’s ownership of the company. In 2011 Bi-Lo LLC, a grocer based in Greenville, South Carolina, agreed to buy Winn-Dixie; in 2013 the group added the Harveys banner, bought from Delhaize Group, and began calling itself Southeastern Grocers, the paper records. The Tampa Bay Times also describes the group opening Fresco y Más stores, beginning in Hialeah in 2016, aimed at Hispanic and Caribbean shoppers. In 2020 Southeastern Grocers announced that it would discontinue the Bi-Lo brand, the Jacksonville Daily Record says.

Ownership then changed twice in quick succession. In August 2023 Southeastern Grocers agreed to sell Winn-Dixie and Harveys to Aldi, which completed the purchase in March 2024 and began converting some stores to its own format, the Jacksonville Daily Record reported. On 7 February 2025, the paper reported, Southeastern Grocers announced that a consortium of private investors, spearheaded by its chief executive Anthony Hucker and C&S Wholesale Grocers, a long-time supplier, had acquired the company and would immediately take over day-to-day operation of the Winn-Dixie grocery and liquor stores and Harveys Supermarkets. That consortium has owned Winn-Dixie since February 2025.

The name then moved up a level. In October 2025, Grocery Dive and Supermarket News reported that Southeastern Grocers planned to rename itself The Winn-Dixie Company in early 2026, citing a “renewed focus on Florida”; Supermarket News said the plan included remodelling stores, opening new ones, expanding liquor stores and developing private-label products. The Jacksonville Daily Record reports that a new logo for The Winn-Dixie Co. launched in January 2026 and that the company announced the new name on 21 January 2026. The parent remains based in Jacksonville, where the Davis brothers moved their headquarters in 1944.

Winn-Dixie also sits in the background of another grocery story. Supermarket News reported in 2011 that Ralph Ketner worked for Winn-Dixie before leaving in 1957 to found Food Town, which became Food Lion.

For a design guide, Winn-Dixie shows how a merged name can outlast the families and companies that owned it, and even become the name of its parent. Compare Publix, another Florida grocer, and Piggly Wiggly, one of the banners the Davis family once absorbed. For this guide we use a red and a navy with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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