In 1876 the brothers Thomas and Stuart Musgrave opened a grocery on North Main Street in Cork. They were aged 25 and 18, and had moved to Cork from County Leitrim.
The business incorporated in 1894 as Musgrave Brothers Limited, with a charter to retail and wholesale sugar, coffee, tea, spices, fruit, olive oil, and other foodstuffs. The company also ran a bakery and confectionary, and was listed as a mineral water manufacturer, iron and hardware merchant, druggist, fish and ice merchant, stationer, and haberdasher.
At the same time, the brothers built and ran Cork’s iconic Metropole Hotel, as well as a sweet factory and a laundry. The first Musgrave grocery relocated to larger premises at 84 Grand Parade and by 1896 the brothers had opened a grocery in Tralee, County Kerry.
Thomas and Stuart Musgrave (seated) with Chairman Philip Toppin
In those days our main store on Grand Parade was separated into two areas, one for retail and one for wholesale. The retail store operated like other groceries of the time, with customers placing orders that were filled by clerks. The back half of the Grand Parade building housed the wholesale business.
By 1899 we had annual sales of around £67,000. Thomas''''s son John L. Musgrave became managing director in 1908, a position he held for the next 40 years. Sales grew steadily in the early years of the century, with an annual turnover of £277,658 by the beginning of the First World War in 1914.
|top| New premises on Cornmarket Street War and the Irish struggle for independence shook both country and business for the next decade and it was not until 1925 that we made our next big move to large new premises on Cornmarket Street. This huge grocery warehouse gave us significant competitive advantage over other wholesale grocers in the area. By this time the business was almost exclusively wholesale.
Back then our customers were primarily small grocers all over the south of Ireland. We marketed our goods by sending out travelling salesmen. Unusually, John L. Musgrave made a point of calling on major clients personally. Long-term personal relationships have always been an essential component of our business model. Trade flourished through the late 1920s and into the early 1930s.
New premises Cornmarket Street
Like all traders, our business suffered during the Depression and with the outbreak of the Second World War. However, John L. Musgrave had wisely stockpiled tea before the war, as well as sugar and spices, and he helped his clients get an official increase in their tea allocations for the course of the conflict. We also refused to take more than the government controlled price for tea, at a time when it sold on the black market for enormous sums. This increased confidence in the company, and many small groceries apparently switched their trade to us for that reason.
Though sales grew through the 1950s, profits remained static. John L. Musgrave was succeeded by his son Jack and Jack’s cousin Hugh Musgrave became a senior executive. This third generation of Musgraves inherited the business at a time of significant changes in the grocery business worldwide. The self-service groceries that had become commonplace in the US were now springing up in England. It was clear this new type of store would soon threaten the old-fashioned grocers that comprised our 2,000 clients in Ireland.
|top| VG trading system Jack Musgrave transformed the way we did business. In 1958 he joined forces with a Dutch franchise called VG, or Voluntary Group, and instituted VG''''s trading system.
Our client groceries now signed up to become part of the VG fold. This meant they pledged to buy all their stock from us, while we in turn lowered our prices as a result of increased buying power and lower distribution costs. VG stores benefited from group advertising and group-wide sales.
In the late 1950s, distribution costs were lowered by another major shift in the way we did business. Instead of packing the orders for our clients, we introduced a "cash and carry" system. In 1966, with business growing, we completed a new distribution centre just south of Cork. The transformation of the business model had a positive impact on the bottomline: sales grew from £1.31 million in 1961 to £3.02 million in 1969 and profits quadrupled.
Hugh Mackeown became managing director in 1971. This was a period of significant growth for the company. Musgrave Brothers became Musgrave Group in 1973. In the mid-1970s, we spent £5 million on four new cash and carry stores – two in Dublin, one in Cork and another in Limerick. These new outlets were large, modern, efficient and increasingly profitable.
|top| SuperValu and Centra In the early 1980s, with growing commercial pressure from the multiples, Mackeown and the Musgrave board decided it was time to update the VG system. At the time, some VG stores were tiny corner stores, while others were modern, full-service supermarkets. So the group was divided into two brand-name stores. Large stores would go under the name SuperValu, while the smaller stores would be renamed Centra.
By the late 1980s, the SuperValu group included 122 stores, and Centra had grown to over 250 outlets.
Musgrave pioneered cash & carry in the late 1950s
Sales reached £320 million by 1989, and the independent sector of the Irish grocery market had recovered against the onslaught of the national chains.
|top| Dialsur aquisition In 1994 we moved overseas. We acquired the family-owned Dialsur, based in Alicante, a business with 17 cash and carry outlets and a franchise chain of 46 Dialprix retail groceries.
In 1997 Seamus Scally became chief executive of Musgrave Group. One of his first moves was to consolidate our position in Northern Ireland, first with the acquisition of the chain of 21 Wellworth stores, followed by a systematic recruitment strategy. By the late 1990s we had a 10 per cent share of the Northern Ireland grocery market.
In 1997 we launched the highly successful DayToday brand, servicing smaller grocers that wanted to be part of an independent retailer network across Ireland.
In 1999 SuperValu annual retail sales broke the €1 billion barrier.
|top| Budgens acquisition In 2000, we bought a 43 per cent share of the English grocery chain Budgens, which operated 167 stores in London, southern and south-eastern England, and also ran food courts at some 40 petrol stations. At the time, almost all the stores were company-owned, but our plan was to covert them all of them to independent ownership.
In 2001 our Foodservices business was created to service pubs, hotels, restaurants and the contract catering sector in Ireland.This was regarded as an important extention of the company''''s cash and carry and delivered retail services business.
We completed the acquisition of Budgens convenience stores in 2002 and bought the UK Londis franchise in 2004.
n 2005, the company acquired Variety Foods. Together with the acquisition of C&R Frozen Foods in 2004 and the launch of the Excellence foodservice product range, this gave the company a market-leading role in the €3.5 billion a year food catering business.
Also in 2005 we launched a new symbol group called Daybreak. This was range of larger convenience stores to complement the DayToday and Centra brands. By the end of 2006, we had helped to launch over 100 stores under the Daybreak banner.
In September 2006 the company opened the Ireland''''s first cash and carry outlet dedicated to the supply of food and catering equipment in Ballymun, North Dublin. May of the same year saw significant enhancements to our supply chain, with the opening of a 150,000 square foot ambient warehouse and distribution operation in Kilcock, Co. Kildare.
|top| Recent developments In 2007 Musgrave completed the sale of Budgens own stores in Great Britain - a year ahead of schedule. All Budgens stores are now owned by entrepreneurial food retailers. In September the company acquired J&J Haslett, a good business with a strong position in the Northern Ireland convenience market. The acquisition brings our share of that market to 16 per cent.
In the area of corporate social responsibility (CSR ) Musgrave’s became the first indigenous Irish company to win Chambers Ireland’s President’s Award for Overall Outstanding Achievement in CSR. In Northern Ireland we won Business in the Community’s Company of the Year, in recognition of our contributions to the environment, the workplace and the community.
We have continued to evolve our Market Street cash & carry concept. Market Street is about covering all the standard core retail and foodservice categories under one roof. But it’s also about creating a compelling environment with regular promotions, tastings and demonstrations. The response and feedback from retailers and caterers has been extremely encouraging. In the course of 2007 we opened two further ‘Market Streets’ in Belfast and Cork.
