Innovation key to chain's success

The deputy chairman and marketing director of Superquinn, Mr Eamonn Quinn, has told the story in interviews of being approached by his local parish priest at the age of 16 to commiserate with him at the sale of his father's business.

The story has been told as a means of dismissing persistent rumours down the years that the supermarket chain was about to be the subject of a bid by any number of potential international retail giants.

However, that rumour has now come to pass, and the company is to be sold in the coming months, not to Sainsbury or to any of the other major players in the international supermarket industry but to a group of Irish investors, including a number of leading property developers.

The company's founder and current executive chairman, Sen Feargal Quinn, said yesterday that his new role as president of Select Retail Holdings, the company which in future will run the business, would be to guarantee the continuation of Superquinn's traditional ethos and culture.

Customer service and innovation have been central to the retail philosophy of Sen Quinn since he established his first outlet in Dundalk, then named Quinn's Supermarket, in 1960.

Early on he decided that his shops would specialise in fresh food. Non-grocery items such as hardware or drapery were not stocked.

In 1973, Superquinn (by which it had become known three years earlier) pioneered the concept in Ireland of in-store bakeries where customers could see bread being baked before them.

Later this idea was expanded, and over the years a whole range of specialist fresh food departments developed alongside the regular retail floor space.

These departments included delicatessens, pizza kitchens, pasta kitchens, salad kitchens and sausage kitchens.

Another key feature of Sen Quinn's philosophy was that the entire organisation should be focused on the customer.

His official company profile on the Superquinn website maintains that "to remind his shop managers that their real job is the shop floor, he always instructs his architects to give them a small dingy office".

"People who work at Superquinn's headquarters have sometimes found their desk disappeared while they have been away on holiday."

Sen Quinn also introduced innovations in Irish retailing such as creches to look after children while their parents do the shopping, an umbrella facility for shoppers on wet days and a service to carry out groceries to customers' cars.

Sen Quinn has a family background in the retail sector.

His father, Mr Eamonn Quinn, operated a chain of grocery stores called Payantake in the 1940s.

He later established the Red Island holiday camp in Skerries in north Dublin, where the young Feargal first worked.

Outside of Superquinn, Sen Quinn was chairman of An Post from 1979 to 1989, and within three years annual losses of around £12 million at the company had been turned into a small surplus.

He was elected to the Seanad in 1993 as an independent senator on the national university panel.

He received a Papal knighthood in 1994.

His son, Eamonn, the current deputy chairman, joined Superquinn in 1986.

A graduate of Trinity College Dublin with a degree in economics and mathematics, he claims that his retail career started at the age of 10 collecting trolleys.

He worked in investment banking before joining the family company, where he worked as a general assistant and later store manager at the Sutton branch.