Nose

The Company has its origins in a Bristol-based grocer known as J H Mills which was founded in 1875 and which developed a self service supermarket chain named Gateway Foodmarkets in 1950.[6] Gateway Foodmarkets was taken over by the Linfood Holdings, which already owned the Frank Dee wholesaler business and a chain of 70 supermarkets, in 1977.[6] In 1983 Linfood Holdings was renamed the DeeCorporation.[6]
[edit]Acquisitions
Alec Monk, Chief Executive at the Dee Corporation, having escaped a takeover bid from Argyll Foods in 1981,[7] decided to create his own supermarket empire. Two of the biggest acquisitions were of International Stores,[6] bought from British American Tobacco in 1984, and Fine Fare,[6] bought from Associated British Foods in the following year. By this time the DeeCorporation had over 1,100 stores, and it had nearly 12% of the market, not far behind Sainsbury's and Tesco.[8] Most of the Dee Corporation’s outlets were small, high-street stores. Monk argued that there was a future for well-run conventional supermarkets as well as the large out-of-town stores.
However, by 1987 the Dee Corporation ran into problems, mainly because of the difficulty ofintegrating so many disparate businesses. Some disposals were made in that year, including the Linfood wholesaling operation. In 1988, the Dee Corporation changed its name to the Gateway Corporation,[9] and a new retailing chief was recruited from the US. Investors remained sceptical, and in 1989 the Company was the subject of a £2bn takeover bid from a newly formed company, Isosceles; the deal was partlyfinanced by a pre arranged sale of ninety Gateway stores to Asda.[8]
Gateway also took over some of the former Carrefour hypermarkets when the French retailer exited Britain in the late 1980s, notably the store at the Merry Hill Shopping Centre in the West Midlands in 1988 - although this lasted just two years before the store was sold on to Asda.
[edit]Isosceles era
When Isosceles, a newlycreated financial group led by David Smith and backed by several big investing institutions, bid successfully for Gateway in 1989 and took the company private, the plan was to restructure the business and refocus it on what were called “middle ground” outlets, falling between the larger out of town superstores and smaller, inner city neighbourhood shops; the average size of the stores was between5,000 sq ft (460 m2) and 10,000 sq ft (930 m2). The promoters of the Isosceles bid believed that, after this disposal and extensive restructuring of the rest of the portfolio, Gateway could become a viable competitor; the intention was to re-float the company on the stock market within three to five years. However, the bid was highly leveraged, and it was not clear that the new company would be ableto fund the necessary modernisation of the business.[10]
Some of the planned disposals of non-core businesses took longer than expected to complete. Financial strains led to the enforced departure of David Smith and other executives in 1991.[10]
[edit]Somerfield history



A Somerfield (former Safeway) in Oakwood, Leeds
In the following year, a new chief executive, Bob Willett, was appointedand a decision was taken to rebrand the company's operations as Somerfield after a successful pilot scheme in 1990 with a new store and the first Somerfield store in the country being built in Burnham on Sea, Somerset, and the company then built its success upon the new brand alongside the existing Gateway and Food Giant chains.[6] A small number of stores were also relaunched under a new FoodGiant discount brand, with the first store opening in Nottingham in 1991.[6]
Two years later, yet another chief executive, David Simons, was in command. In May 1994 the Company changed its name to Somerfield plc.[6]
According to The Guardian, the holding company almost collapsed in the 1990s under a “mountain of debt”.[11] In 1996, Somerfield plc was floated on the stock market in an initial...