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( This is directed to people in the Philadelphia/ Delaware Valley area but everyone with knowledge can chime in. back in the mid 90s I recall seeing a small old abandoned truck with a half a dozen old logos all of them marked out with black paint. one of them being the old "Shop n' Bag" logo and the other being the old "Unity" brand coffee logo the other logos at the time i could not make out. fast forward 10 years later and thanks partly to great sites like this one and news archive sites. I discovered that the other logos were the old logos of the Topco brands past .and present like Food Club and Top Crest. I also found an archived Shop N Bag ad from late 1979 that advertised Food Club Brand alongside the Shop N Bag brand. I am aware that Topco is a cooperative of Retailers and wholesalers and that one of its founding members was Penn Fruit ( which competed with the SNB stores and the old Unity Frankford corner stores that preceded them) I know that there was some non-compete clause between Topco members in the early days of the co-op. i wonder did Shop N Bags join Topco after Penn Fruit went out or was there some special deal since Penn Fruit was a corporate chain and S&B was a co-op made up of Mom and Pop grocers. Does anyone remember Topco branded Products being sold at Shop 'n Bag stores?

Hi, Shop &Bag Co_Op members being good businesmen and having former PenFruit customers shoping in many former Penfruit stores now being Shop &Bag were asked for Topco. They arranged to add this private label as a second private label to their stores. This however was short lived and the co-op went back to its Shop &Bag brand. Thriftways private label was Montco, which was short for the Wiliam Mongomery Company, the wholesaler that Fleming purchased. Philadelphia had and extremly strong private label business. Fleming came in and after merging both Frankford Quaker and Fleming Oaks, destroyed this business, by replacing these strong brands with their own national private label, that was poor quality and helped destroy the identity of these two groups.

maynesG wrote:Hi, Shop &Bag Co_Op members being good businesmen and having former PenFruit customers shoping in many former Penfruit stores now being Shop &Bag were asked for Topco. They arranged to add this private label as a second private label to their stores. This however was short lived and the co-op went back to its Shop &Bag brand. Thriftways private label was Montco, which was short for the Wiliam Mongomery Company, the wholesaler that Fleming purchased. Philadelphia had and extremly strong private label business. Fleming came in and after merging both Frankford Quaker and Fleming Oaks, destroyed this business, by replacing these strong brands with their own national private label, that was poor quality and helped destroy the identity of these two groups.

This makes the most sense as Topco back in the day had granted rights to one chain per territory. as for the Shop n Bag grocers of that era having 2 private labels might have been somewhat of a headache as they only had so much square footage in their stores. and yes I agree that Fleming mismanaged the identity of the Thriftway and Shop n Bag stores by consolidation of private labels, the "Best Yet" brand seemed cheap and was poor quality compared to the quality of the respected Montco and Shop n Bag labels. this probably drove more customers away from their stores which already were going up against newer larger stores of competitors. Topco/Food Club would make one more bow in the 80s when the first Giant (Carlisle) stores came to the Greater Philly area of course they would switch to the Finast and later Giant brands.