Schnucks

Schnuck Markets, Inc.

Type	Private
Industry	Retail
Founded	1939 St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Number of locations	100+
Products	Groceries (Bakery, dairy, deli, frozen foods, general grocery, meat, pharmacy, produce, seafood, snacks, and liquor)
Revenue	$2.6 billion (2011)
Number of employees	15,000
Website	Schnucks.com

Schnucks is a supermarket chain. Established in the St. Louis area, the company was started in 1939 with the opening of a 1,000-square-foot (93 m²) store in north St. Louis and now operates 97 stores in five states throughout the Midwest. Schnucks also ran stores under the Logli Supermarkets and Hilander Foods banners. Schnucks is one of the largest privately held supermarket chains in the United States.

Schnuck Markets, Inc. was founded in St. Louis in 1939. In 1946, its first large-scale retail store was opened, measuring 2,700 square feet (250 m²). By 1952, its first major store was opened in Brentwood, a St. Louis suburb. The Schnucks symbol, a soldier, was introduced in 1968 (during the Vietnam War). Schnucks continued to grow, acquiring stores in Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Missouri, Iowa, and Wisconsin. A previous merger in 1970 had seen Schnucks acquire the Bettendorf-Rapp chain of grocery stores—temporarily forming the Schnucks-Bettendorf's chain (a joke was that an initially proposed name for the merged company was "Schnuckendorfs") until the latter half of the combined name was dropped a couple of years later—just as Bettendorf's had swallowed up the Rapp chain of stores to form Bettendorf-Rapp's in the 1960s. Schnucks underwent a major expansion in 1995 when it purchased from Loblaws the National Supermarkets chain, also based in St. Louis.

Schnucks' growth in the St. Louis area was bolstered by the local abandonment of two major supermarket chains: A&P in the 1970s, and Kroger in 1986.

In 2002, Schnucks agreed to buy 12 Seessel's stores in the Memphis, Tennessee area, from Albertsons, Inc. Schnucks operated these stores until September 2011. Kroger subsequently purchased these stores; eight are to reopen as Kroger, with the others closing altogether. Seven convenience stores operating under the Schnucks name also were sold, to be converted to the Kroger-owned brand Kwik Shop.