Talk:Yellow Pack

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Who invented it?

There was a comment here on the main page (e.g. the wrong place) stating that a UK supermarket somehow connected to Quinnsworth called "Fine Fare" invented the term Yellow Pack. I've never heard of them in all the time I've lived in Ireland or the UK. Also, I'm almost certain that I've read Maurice Pratt confirming the Yellow Pack as a Quinnsworth invention.

The first Google hit for Yellow Pack is a rip of the page from here onto another site.

Googling for "Fine Fare" brings up a single New York supermarket.

I'm going to crosspost this to the Irish wikipedians board though...

[edit] Removed material

I've copied the deleted material here for reference:

This claim is untrue. 'Yellow Packs' (originally 'YelLow Price Packs') was a brand name invented in May 1980 by the UK's Fine Fare, Quinnsworth's larger and more innovative sister company. The brand described a concept loosely based on the less focussed, but similarly designed, generic product range of Fine Fare's Canadian associate company, Loblaws Ltd.

Quinnsworth borrowed the Fine Fare design - and in some cases the products themselves - only after the products had proved themselves in the UK.

— Matt 10:06, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Thanks

I'd like to add that googling for "Yellow Pack" only brings up hits for Quinnsworth, and googling for "Fine Fare" doesn't bring up any UK shopping chains. Hence I doubt that "Fine Fare" were bigger than the (surprisingly large) Quinnsworth.

Loblaws do exist however, and they do have yellow packaged own brand foods. However, Quinnsworth as a firm predates 1980, the referenced date, and Yellow Pack was their (and possibly Ireland's) first own brand products.

If Fine Fare were a division of Power Supermarkets/Associated British Foods, Tescos did a better job of assimilating them from the high street, the net, and the British psyche than they did with Quinnsworth, Crazy Prices or Stewarts. My local Tescos, which has been rebuilt and extended since the takeover, is still known as Quinnsworth, or even O'Briens (the private company that owned it before PSL bought it). No such rememberence of Fine Fare, according to Google.

One things for sure, Quinnsworth were responsible for the naming of "Yellow Pack Flights"

Kiand 17:58, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Fine Fare were bought by the company which is now known as [[Somerfield (UK Retailer)|Somerfield] sometime between 1983 and 1987. E.g., it was never the same company as Power Supermarkets, and was only a minor player in the UK anyway - gets one line in Somerfields corporate history, compared to huge amounts for other companies they consumed. Kiand 21:08, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It's not difficult to find pdf references to Fine Fare's value own-brand [1] or [2]. The quotes below show the original text was justified. [3] gives the Fine Fare market share of the Great Britain packaged grocery sales as 5.1% in 1982 which must have made it larger than any single chain in the Republic of Ireland at the time. --Henrygb 16:44, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• In 1976 a leading French supermarket, Carrefour, introduced a different kind of retailer brand – “Produit Libres”. The idea spread to the UK where it was referred to as generic own branding when Fine Fare introduced their Yellow Pack label. Generics were deliberately designed to appear even cheaper than retailer own brands, as evidenced by their most basic of all forms of packaging. Quinnsworth, a sister company of Fine Fare, introduced the Yellow Pack range in Ireland while Superquinn introduced their own generic range – Thrift. Neither were particularly successful. [4]
• In 1970s Britain – at the peak of British firms copying the style of US generics – it was possible to visit one of the then leading supermarket chains (Fine Fare) and purchase products that would be recognizable as generic own labels by any visiting North American4. With economy packaging in bright yellow, the Fine Fare range covered staple food ingredients such as flour. At that time, Fine Fare was owned by the Canada/UK Weston empire which also owned Loblaw in Canada – from which the idea was copied directly. [5]
• Although, it is debatable if British grocery retailers ever developed a true generic product range, many companies developed product ranges of variable quality in economy packaging priced at between 10-30% below existing retailer brand ranges in the late 1970s/early 1980s (Table VI) (McGoldrick 1974). These ranges were relatively short lived. The most successful range was that of Fine Fare (later acquired by Gateway), whose Yellow Pack brand rose to 850 lines and 13% of company sales in 1984. [6]

I've removed it again, as I missed this first time around (was off the net at the time). As far as I can tell, Fine Fare were unconnected to PSL, and the Westons, who have MAJOR interests in Ireland, didn't own them... so thats been removed. If thats gone, who they nicked it off doesn't matter. And as this isn't the article for own brand products, the Carrefour references has been removed also.

5.2% of the UK in 1982 - 50M people or so? - ~2.5 million consumers. So yeah, probably just about bigger than PSL north and south (NI has mainly ROI retail chains).

Kiand 17:17, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Brining up NI, question: did Stewart's (the NI sister chain to Quinnsworth, no article on Wikipedia yet) use Yellow Pack as well? Stewart's did a lot of things similar to Quinnsworth, what with their Jim Megaw being a dead ringer for Maurice Pratt...

--Rdd 21:07, 8 May 2005 (UTC)