In 1958, Joe Coulombe took over a small chain of convenience stores in the Los Angeles area called Pronto Markets. As Trader Joe's Vice President of Marketing Product Matt Sloan put it in a ...

the late Joe Coulombe. The chain was sold in 1979 to Theo Albrecht, a German entrepreneur who co-founded the ALDI grocery chain in Essen, Germany in 1946 with his brother Karl. The two brothers ...

Trader Joe's started as Pronto Markets under the ownership of Joe Coulombe (yes, there really was a "Trader Joe"), a local chain of less than a dozen California locations more akin to a ...

Trader Joe's was born in 1958 as a small chain of Southern California convenience stores opened by a drugstore executive named Joe Coulombe. In 1967 he changed the stores' name from Pronto Markets ...

If his name doesn't ring a bell, his company will: Joe Coulombe, MBA graduate of 1954, founded the grocery chain Trader Joe's in 1967. Today Trader Joe's is one of the top groceries in the U.S ...