No Frills (grocery store)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the eastern Nebraska and western Iowa "No Frills" chain, please see No Frills (US).

No Frills is a chain of discount grocery stores in Ontario, Canada, area that are owned by the Loblaws company, a division of George Weston, Ltd.. The early No Frills stores mostly sold only No Frills' No Name products (probably the first supermarket to do this in Canada). The franchise was widedly expanded in the 1990s by the Loblaws company.

The company operated a few stores in the Buffalo, New York, area in the United States, but these closed after Loblaws' US chain was sold in the mid-1970s.

In the beginning, No Frills branded their No Name products in yellow and black packaging (the product name in black letters on yellow), without any graphics or product photography to cut down product cost. This went against the prevailing assumptions of marketers about how to attract customers.

Loblaws had introduced the successful better-quality President's Choice products in the middle to late 1980s with higher quality graphic design on their packaging. It started redesigning the No Name products packaging right afterwards. No Name product packaging went from the bland look of the 1970s and early 1980s, to including abstract production illustrations in the 1990s, to (more recently) photos of the products as seen today, all the while maintaining the well branded yellow colour the brand is known for.

In the 1980s, regular national brands were introduced as part of the stores' offerings, and in the 1990s, the President's Choice line of products was introduced from Loblaws. There was originally little public association between No Frills and Loblaws even though they were owned by the same company. The George Weston Company, which owned both companies, may have wanted to separate the markets. No Frills was geared towards budget-conscious consumers, while Loblaws was geared towards more middle class and well-to-do consumers.

No Frills cornered the ethnic consumer market in the Toronto area for the grocery business when Knob Hill Farms went out of business. A huge part of Knob Hill Farms' customer base was ethnic consumers. Some No Frills buildings were previously Knob Hill Farms locations. No Frills also advertises on the multicultural television stations in the Toronto area as did Knob Hill Farms.

The Quebec equivalent of No Frills is known as Maxi and it has about the same store size and colours.

In the late 1990s, A&P Canada introduced Food Basics, a discount grocery store imported from the A&P parent company that was started in New Jersey, to compete directly with No Frills. Sobeys, another competitor of Loblaws, introduced Price Chopper stores to compete in the discount grocery market.