Remembering Joe Coulombe, the San Diego Businessman Who Gave Us Trader Joe’s

Ring the bell.

Trader Joe’s founder Joe Coulombe, a San Diego native and Stanford graduate, passed away at age 89. In 1967, he opened his first Trader Joe’s in Pasadena, targeting the “overeducated and underpaid.” His vision to provide high-quality, international products at good value worked in his favor.

According to Eater, “By the time Coulombe retired as chief executive in 1988, after having sold his interest in the company to German grocery retailer Aldi Nord in 1979, he had already put into place many of the distinct flourishes that separate Trader Joe’s from its competitors today: a focus on natural and organic goods; a private Trader Joe’s label for products bought directly from wholesalers; maritime themes in stores; a policy of discontinuity, with ever-changing inventory; and an expansive array of affordable wines, including the popular $1.99 Charles Shaw known as ‘two-buck Chuck.’”

A Photographer Provides a Window Into the Space of Self-Isolation, Revealing Life Apart Yet Together

Life on pause.

Artisans, Farm + Table, Wine + Beer

Tracing the Journey That Brought a French Winemaking Family to Sonoma’s Hills

Hélène Seillan was nine years old when her family moved to Sonoma County from Bordeaux, France in 1996. Her father, Pierre Seillan, had spent the past two decades making wine in Bordeaux—and the Loire Valley before that—yet, through an early viticulture exchange program between the United States and France in 1974, he first cut his […]

Farm + Table, Foodie Spots, Makers + Entrepreneurs, Small Businesses