Who Owns Trader Joe's? German Since 1979, Price Never Told

America’s most beloved supermarket has been German-owned since 1979. Nobody has ever said what it cost, and nobody has ever complained.

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이 글의 한국어판 → 값을 기억 못 한다고 했다

FIG. 1 — Gross margin before and after California’s late-1976 deregulation. Coulombe rebuilt the company in the ninety days that followed.

In the summer of 2010 a reporter from Fortune asked Joe Coulombe what he had sold his company for. Coulombe was eighty then, thirty-one years past the sale, and had spent nine of those years still running the place. He said he didn’t remember.

It was not a hostile interview. The same conversation produced the line that has followed him ever since, and which he clearly enjoyed: “My children say the Albrechts own the business, but I owned a cult.”

Forty-six years after the transaction, the number is still not on the public record. Not in a filing, not in an obituary, not in the 2021 memoir published a year after Coulombe’s death. The buyers have never said. The seller said he couldn’t recall.

That absence is the most honest place to start, because Trader Joe’s is a company best described by what is missing from it.

The list of things that are not there

Start with the sign on the wall. The company’s own FAQ, live as of this month, puts it in the flattest possible English:

“‘Sale’ is a four-letter word to us. We have low prices, every day. NO coupons. NO membership cards. NO discounts.”

traderjoes.com, general FAQ

There is no online ordering — not for groceries, not even for gift cards, which exist only as physical objects. There are no third-party delivery partnerships. There are no self-checkouts. There is no loyalty program, and the reason the company gives is not sentimental. “That discount is paid for by the manufacturer,” Tara Miller told the company’s own podcast. “The manufacturer pays the store money to get you to buy more.” And then, plainly: “We don’t collect any customer data.”

There is very nearly no advertising. Mark Gardiner, who worked in advertising before working in a Trader Joe’s, told Freakonomics in 2018 that what surprised him most was that there was almost none of it — barely any social media, barely any PR.

One exception is worth recording, because most accounts miss it. Trader Joe’s delivered in Manhattan for about a decade and stopped on 1 March 2019. The company’s explanation was that scrapping delivery beat passing on unmanageable cost increases, and freed up valuable store space.

And the shelves are short. Fewer than four thousand items, against what chief executive Matt Sloan describes as the fifty thousand a normal grocer carries. The industry association FMI puts the 2025 supermarket average at 33,248. Either comparison is startling — eight times, or twelve and a half — and it is more honest to give both, because one of the two numbers is the company describing its rivals.

So: what is this, and why has it never bothered anyone that it is German?

A paragraph in a magazine

The answer starts with a man reading.

Joe Coulombe was born in San Diego on 3 June 1930 and died in Pasadena on 28 February 2020, at eighty-nine. He opened his first Pronto Market in Pacific Palisades over Memorial Day weekend in 1958 — twenty-five hundred square feet — and by the mid-sixties he had eighteen of them.

Then, in October 1965, his backer sold out to Southland, the parent of 7-Eleven. His funding was gone, and the company that now held it was moving into California.

What he did next he attributed, for the rest of his life, to a short item in Scientific American. “There was an article in Scientific American that 60 percent of the people who were qualified to go to college were actually going,” he told the Associated Press. “I felt that this newly educated — not smarter, but better educated — class of people would want something different. That’s how Trader Joe’s started.”

The first one opened in Pasadena in August 1967, on Arroyo Parkway, in a converted water-treatment building of seventy-five hundred square feet. He put a hundred kinds of scotch on the shelves, seventy bourbons, fifty whiskies. Pasadena was not an accident. “All the Trader Joe’s stores were near centers of learning,” he said. “We opened the first one in Pasadena because Pasadena is the epitome of a well-educated town.”

The nautical theming he was less proud of. He had read that the Boeing 747 would make travel dramatically cheaper, which put “trader” and the South Pacific in his head. He later called it a terrible idea.

Two weeks

The Trader Joe’s that exists now — four thousand items, private label, direct from the maker — is usually described as Coulombe’s founding insight. It was not. It was emergency surgery.

At the end of 1976, California repealed fair trade on liquor and stopped enforcing minimum milk prices. Coulombe’s account of what happened next is one sentence long:

“Our gross profit went from 22% to 2% in two weeks.”

Joe Coulombe, Supermarket News, 6 December 2010

He rebuilt the company in ninety days. The rebuild is the model: buy in very large volume, deal directly with whoever makes the thing, pay suppliers quickly, and own the inventory rather than take it on consignment. Sloan lists those four as the reasons the prices are what they are, and adds the corollary that follows from them — “We don’t charge slotting fees. The people who make the things we sell don’t pay us for shelf space” — and its consequence: “The only way we make money at Trader Joe’s is when a customer buys something at the register.”

Which is a genuinely unusual sentence in American grocery. Most of the aisle is rented.

The cigarettes

While Coulombe was rebuilding in California, two brothers in Germany were finishing a divorce.

Karl and Theo Albrecht split their company in 1960 or 1961 — the company’s own history and Forbes disagree — and separated it legally in 1966. The reason most often given is cigarettes: Karl thought they attracted shoplifters. The journalist Martin Kuhna disputes this and puts it down to differences in management style. Both accounts are in circulation and neither has been settled.

What matters is the division. Karl’s Aldi Süd got the American ALDI name and opened its first Iowa store in 1976. Theo’s Aldi Nord got France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Poland — and no way into the United States under his own sign.

Forbes, in Theo’s 2010 obituary, states the consequence directly: “Barred by the agreement from opening Aldi stores in the U.S., Theo acquired discount food chain Trader Joe’s in 1979.”

He did not buy it because he loved it. He bought it because his brother had taken the name.

The sale itself has one detail worth keeping. Coulombe held a majority, but he and the employee shareholders sold together — forty-five per cent between them — and he insisted every shareholder receive the same price per share. He then stayed on as chief executive until 1988.

One correction, since the shorthand is nearly universal. Aldi Nord does not own Trader Joe’s. Three family foundations established in 1973 — Markus, Lukas and Jakobus — hold the shares in Aldi Nord and in Trader Joe’s. They are sisters under one trust, not parent and subsidiary. Which is how Trader Joe’s can say, accurately, that it operates independently of Aldi Nord while having exactly the same owners.

Seventeen days

To understand why none of this is ever discussed, you have to go back to 1971.

Theo Albrecht was kidnapped and held for seventeen days. The ransom was seven million marks, roughly two million dollars, and it was delivered by Franz Hengsbach, the Bishop of Essen. About half was recovered. Afterwards Albrecht sued to deduct the ransom as a business expense. He lost.

He then disappeared. Forbes described the brothers as more reclusive than yetis. Two photographs of Theo are generally available: one from 1971 and one from 1987. He travelled in an armoured car by a different route each day and never spoke publicly.

Trader Joe’s silence about its own numbers is not a policy invented in Monrovia. It is inherited.

FIG. 2 — Costco’s figure comes from an audited filing. Trader Joe’s are third-party estimates, the most recent dating to 2014.

A company that discloses nothing

Fortune called the management “obsessively secretive” in 2010, noted that the Monrovia headquarters has no sign on it, and observed that the company had never cooperated with a significant article about how it runs its business.

The store count is knowable, because the company publishes it: 543 stores across 42 states and the District of Columbia in May 2023, 579 by early 2025, and a figure of 624 mentioned on the company’s own podcast this year. Thirty-four stores opened in 2024, forty-three in 2025. The state count checks out against the company’s own store directory; the eight states without one are Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming and Mississippi.

Revenue is a different matter. There is no official figure. There has never been an official figure. What exists is a spread of estimates, and they do not agree with each other in ways that should embarrass everyone who repeats them. Fortune estimated roughly eight billion dollars for fiscal 2009. Forbes, five days earlier, put it at about five and a half billion on 340 stores. CNBC said sixteen and a half billion for 2020. The only number ever attributed to management appears in a director’s biography for a nonprofit board, where Dan Bain is described as having grown the business from $1.2 billion to more than $20 billion — a board bio, not a financial statement.

Which brings us to the claim that turns up in nearly every profile: that Trader Joe’s sells more per square foot than Costco.

It does not hold up. Costco’s FY2025 10-K reports net sales of $269.912 billion across 914 warehouses averaging roughly 147,000 square feet. Divide it out — $269.912 billion, over 914 warehouses of 147,000 square feet each — and you get about $2,008 per square foot. The Trader Joe’s estimates in circulation run from $1,734 to a little over $2,000, and the most recent of them dates to 2014. The two are in the same band, and only one of them is audited.

The convenient number is the unaudited one. It has been repeated for fifteen years.

The one fight

There is a place where Trader Joe’s is contested, and it is not its nationality.

In February 2026 Forbes named it the best large employer in America, up from second the previous year, on a survey of more than 217,000 workers. That is the company’s own strongest evidence and it should be stated at full strength.

Since 2022, five stores have voted to unionize: Hadley, Massachusetts (45–31, the first, on 28 July 2022), Minneapolis (55–5), Louisville (48–36), Oakland (73–53), and Chicago’s North Center, where a 71–70 result turned on a single disputed ballot that the National Labor Relations Board counted in July 2026. One store, Essex Crossing in New York, tied 76–76 and therefore failed.

As of this month, no store has a first contract.

The company hired Littler Mendelson, held mandatory pre-vote meetings, and sued the union for using the words “Trader Joe’s” — a trademark claim it lost in January 2024, when the judge said the company had tried to weaponize the legal system against workers. The Ninth Circuit revived that suit in September 2025.

And on 16 January 2024, at a hearing before Administrative Law Judge Charles Muhl, the company’s lawyer Christopher Murphy of Morgan Lewis argued that the National Labor Relations Act — including the Board’s structure and its administrative law judges — is unconstitutional. Amazon and Starbucks have made the same argument; the same firm represented SpaceX.

The ending is the part that mostly went unreported. In a footnote to his decision of 8 November 2024, Muhl recorded that Trader Joe’s had made no argument in its brief in support of that defense. It raised the constitution and then declined to litigate it. The same decision found seventeen violations at Hadley between 30 May and 11 June 2022, including that unionized crew at Hadley and Minneapolis received worse retirement benefits than non-union staff. In February 2026 the Fifth Circuit denied the company’s petition and enforced the Board’s order.

One number from that story deserves care. Fortune reported in 2010 that Trader Joe’s contributed 15.4 per cent of employees’ gross income to retirement accounts. The current careers page does not state a contribution rate at all. The 2010 figure is a fact about 2010.

FIG. 3 — The six questions this series asks of every brand. Two of Trader Joe’s six have no public answer.

Nobody signed

The first article in this series was about Budweiser, and the number that ran through it was 11,449 — the people who signed a petition when an American beer turned out to be Belgian.

Trader Joe’s has been German-owned for forty-six years. There has never been a boycott over it. Every campaign against the company that can be found is about labor: the firing of Ben Bonnema in 2021, the union fights since. Not one is about the Albrechts.

Fill in the six cells and half of them come back blank. Born in Pasadena in 1967. Headquartered in Monrovia, in a building with no sign. Owned by three German foundations. Payroll met by Trader Joe’s, for a crew whose size is an estimate. Where it is incorporated: not disclosed. Who makes the food: more than eighty per cent of it is private label, and the only manufacturers that can be named with certainty are the ones that appear in federal recall records — which is how anyone knows that the steamed chicken soup dumplings recalled in March 2024 were made by CJ Foods Manufacturing Beaumont.

A Korean company, making the dumplings, for a German-owned American grocer, in California.

Coulombe was asked what he sold it for and said he didn’t remember. Forty-six years on, that remains the most complete answer anyone has given.