Argyll Foods
UK business
Argyll Foods plc was the fourth biggest supermarket operator in the United Kingdom, through its acquisitions of a number of smaller supermarkets. In 1987 the company acquired Safeway Inc.'s UK subsidiary and in 1996 it changed its name to Safeway plc.
History
Early years
The company was founded as James Gulliver Associates in 1977 by James Gulliver, a former Fine Fare Chief Executive, Alistair Grant, a marketing specialist and David Webster, a merchant banker. The founders acquired two food businesses, Morgan Edwards, a business owning the Supervalu chain of foodstores, and Louis C. Edwards, a meat business in Manchester, integrated them and then, in 1980, adopted the name Argyll Foods after Gulliver's place of birth.
In 1981 the company bought Oriel Foods, a food manufacturing and wholesaling business which the founders had briefly owned previously in the 1970s before they sold it to RCA Corporation and which owned Lo-Cost Discount Stores. Also in 1981 the company made a £91m hostile bid for Linfood Holdings, a wholesaling and retailing group which was substantially bigger than itself and owned Gateway Foodmarkets: however the bid was referred to the Monopolies Commission and did not proceed.
Presto and other acquisitions
The company went on to buy Allied Suppliers from Cavenham Foods in 1982: this brought with it the Presto, Liptons, Galbraith and R & J Templeton chains. The company had become the fourth biggest supermarket with 923 stores.
In 1984 Argyll acquired the Thornaby-based Amos Hinton plc which operated 55 supermarkets under the Hintons name in the North East of England, Cumbria and Yorkshire.
In 1985 Presto became Argyll's principal name for all larger stores as well as smaller stores in the North of England and Scotland.
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This entry incorporates text from “Argyll Foods” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.