Trader Joe’s Supermarket Founder Joe Coulombe Passes Away

By: Rusty Brooks

Joe Coulombe, the founder of the popular Trader Joes supermarket chain has passed away at 89 years old.

Trader Joe’s is well known for their large organic and specialty food selection, rivaled only by Whole Foods and Wegmans in terms of quality goods.

The chain began in 1958 as a Greater Los Angeles area chain of Pronto Market convenience stores. The original Pronto Markets were so similar to 7-Eleven that Joe Coulombe felt the competition with 7-Eleven would be disastrous, the L.A Times chronicled

Coulombe is said to have developed the idea of the Trader Joe’s South Seas motif while on vacation in the Caribbean. The Tiki culture fad of the 1950s and 1960s was fresh in the cultural memory, and Trader Vic’s was at its height with 25 locations worldwide. He had noticed that Americans were traveling more and returning home with tastes for food and wine they had trouble satisfying in supermarkets of the time.

The first store branded as “Trader Joe’s” opened in 1967. This store, on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena, California, remains in operation to this day. In the first few decades since opening, some of the stores offered fresh meats provided by butchers who leased space in the stores. Trader Joe’s at one time had sandwich shops, freshly cut cheese and freshly squeezed orange juice all in-store.

BusinessWeek reported that Trader Joe’s quintupled the number of its stores between 1990 and 2001 and multiplied its profits by ten. Supermarket News estimated Trader Joe’s sales for 2015 at $13 billion, and placed Trader Joe’s 21st on the list of “SN’s Top 75 Retailers for 2016.

As of October 8, 2019, Trader Joe’s had 504 stores in the United States with stores being added regularly, Scrape Hero reported.

Trader Joe’s founder Joe Coulombe, who envisioned his stores as “for overeducated and underpaid people, for all the classical musicians, museum curators, journalists,” has died at the age of 89, his family confirmed to the Associated Press.

Eater reported: “Coulombe, a San Diego native and a Stanford graduate, opened the first Trader Joe’s in 1967 in Pasadena, Calif. — the result of a pivot towards customers who had an appetite for high-quality international goods like olive and wine for lower price points. “He wanted to make sure whatever was sold in our store was of good value,” Coulombe’s son, also named Joe, told the AP. “Always the aim was to provide good food and good value to people.”

“By the time Coulombe retired as chief executive in 1988, after having sold his interest in the company to Germany grocery retailer Aldi Nord in 1979, he had already put into place many of the distinct flourishes that separate Trader Joe’s from its competitors today: a focus on natural and organic goods; a private Trader Joe’s label for products bought directly from wholesalers; maritime themes in stores; a policy of discontinuity, with ever-changing inventory; and an expansive array of affordable wines, including the popular $1.99 Charles Shaw known as “two-buck Chuck”, Eater.com reported.