Stop & ShopCopied

In 2018 Stop & Shop began repositioning its brand, starting with 21 supermarkets around Hartford, Connecticut, as the test market for a 70 million dollar investment. Supermarket News reported that the refresh combined a modernised store format with a new logo, reflecting a strategy built on convenience and fresh, fast, healthy and local food, from an in-store smoker to poke bowls and taqueria stations. The chain planned to roll the new look out to its more than 400 Northeast stores over the next few years.

President Mark McGowan said the customer was changing and the chain was evolving its entire shopping experience. In a later column, Supermarket News described him at Ahold Delhaize's capital markets day pasting a cutout of the new logo over the old one on a slide showing the group's global brands.

That old logo was the wedge, a four-colour mark sometimes called the fruit bowl or compared to a tropical bird rising from its nest. It was introduced about a decade earlier as a common logo for Ahold's Stop & Shop and Giant Food, and used to identify store brands without a banner name. The new logo, the columnist noted, is inspired by the stoplight imagery the wedge had once replaced: red and green stacked circles.

In the renovated stores the circles became a playful system, rendered as a sliced tomato over a mango, a pepperoni and a lime, or two glasses of beer seen from above.

Supermarket News described what the logo was attached to. Hartford would test an in-store smoker, poke bowl and taqueria stations and frictionless checkout, more space for local products such as apples from Rogers Orchards, beer from Two Roads and coffee roasted in the city, a bigger push on store brands including Nature's Promise, and price cuts on thousands of items. Updated signage would make departments easier to find. A grocery logo is only as convincing as the aisles behind it, and this one arrived with a credible list.

Returning to the stoplight is the smartest decision a supermarket made that year. Stop and go is literally in the name, and two circles are endlessly adaptable, as the produce puns show. The wedge was abstract and shared with another chain. The stoplight belongs to Stop & Shop alone, and it is the kind of mark shoppers will remember without being told what it means.