Grocery Store Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
67 free Grocery Store trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
46 free grocery store trivia questions with answers. Everyone shops in one, almost nobody knows their history. This grocery store trivia quiz covers how the supermarket was invented and who runs the ones you shop in now: Clarence Saunders and the first self-service Piggly Wiggly in 1916, King Kullen's garage in Queens, Sylvan Goldman's folding shopping cart, the pack of Juicy Fruit that was the first item ever scanned with a barcode, and the first self-checkout machine. The brand rounds cover Kroger, Walmart, A&P, Safeway, Publix, H-E-B, Wegmans, Meijer, Whole Foods and Amazon, Costco and Price Club, Aldi and its two halves, Trader Joe's and Two Buck Chuck, and the British and French giants Tesco, Sainsbury's and Carrefour. Easy questions up front for a family or office quiz night, with tougher ones on founders, dates and odd naming stories further in. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the chains, the inventions and the people, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 67 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which chain, opened in Memphis in 1916, is credited as the first true self-service grocery store?
Piggly Wiggly
Piggly Wiggly sent shoppers through a turnstile to pick goods off the shelves themselves instead of asking a clerk at the counter; founder Clarence Saunders patented the layout in 1917.
Q 02Why are eggs kept chilled in American supermarkets but sold off the shelf in much of Europe?
American eggs are washed
American eggs are washed, which strips the shell's natural protective coating, so they must be chilled to keep bacteria out; most European producers leave the coating on instead.
Q 03Grammar sticklers say supermarket express-lane signs reading '10 items or less' should use which word instead?
Fewer
Fewer is the sticklers' word for things you can count; rather than take a side, Tesco rewrote its British checkout signs in 2008 to read 'Up to 10 items'.
Q 04What everyday object inspired the design of the first shopping cart?
A folding chair
A folding chair gave Goldman the template: he pictured a basket on the seat and wheels on the legs, and with mechanic Fred Young built a carrier that stacked flat when not in use.
Q 05What was the first product scanned with a UPC barcode at a checkout, in 1974?
A pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum
A pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum was no lucky dip: the Marsh executive who played first shopper said he picked it to show a barcode could be printed on something that small.
Q 06Which company's engineer George Laurer designed the striped UPC barcode that supermarkets adopted in 1973?
IBM
IBM's George Laurer was expected to copy the round bull's-eye code that rival RCA was testing, but he refused because circles smeared when printed, and his rectangle of bars won.
Q 07In which chain was the first self-checkout machine installed, near Atlanta in 1986?
Kroger
Kroger stores around Atlanta trialled CheckRobot's machines in 1986; the system, built by David Humble's firm in Deerfield Beach, Florida, had shoppers scan items and then pay a central cashier.
Q 08In which city did Barney Kroger open his grocery business in 1883, aged 23?
Cincinnati
Cincinnati is where his Great Western Tea Company began; in 1901 he started baking his own bread, the first American grocer to do so, reckoning he could sell a fresher loaf for less.
Q 09Which Arkansas town, where Sam Walton opened a five-and-dime on the square in 1950, is still Walmart's home?
Bentonville
Bentonville has been the company's base ever since, yet the first store actually called Walmart opened in 1962 in neighbouring Rogers.
Q 10Sam Walton's first store, opened in Newport, Arkansas in 1945, traded under which chain's name?
Ben Franklin
Ben Franklin's franchise did so well in Walton's hands that his landlord refused to renew the lease and handed the Newport store to his own son.
Q 11Which chain, with over 15,000 stores at its 1930s peak, was America's largest grocer until the 1970s?
A&P
A&P's size made it a target: independent grocers pressed Congress into the 1936 Robinson-Patman Act against chain-store discounts, and in the 1970s Safeway finally overtook it.
Q 12What did A&P's first stores sell in 1860s New York?
Tea and coffee
Tea and coffee: the firm kept prices low by selling direct, with no middleman's markup, and the Great Atlantic & Pacific name followed in 1869, the year the transcontinental railroad was finished.
Q 13What did the Skaggs family's grocery chain, begun in Idaho and merged into Safeway in 1926, refuse to offer shoppers?
Credit
Q 21In which city did Costco open its first warehouse in 1983?
Seattle
Seattle's first Costco opened in September 1983; co-founder Jim Sinegal had learned the trade under the San Diego retailer who pioneered warehouse clubs, and ten years later their two companies merged.
Q 22Costco's Kirkland Signature house brand is named after what?
The Washington suburb where it was once headquartered
The Washington suburb where it was once headquartered: the label launched from Kirkland in the mid-1990s and outlived the move to nearby Issaquah because, co-founder Jim Sinegal said, nobody could spell Issaquah.
Q 23Which San Diego warehouse retailer, opened in 1976 in a converted aircraft hangar, later merged with Costco?
Credit: the Reverend Samuel Skaggs held that grocers' credit hurt farm families who saw cash only at harvest, so the chain his sons built, 428 stores by 1926, sold for cash alone.
Q 14Which Florida supermarket chain, founded in 1930, is owned by its employees and the Jenkins family?
Publix
Publix founder George Jenkins had managed a rival grocery in Winter Haven before opening his own store in 1930; today current and former employees hold most of the shares and his family much of the rest.
Q 15Where did the founder of Florida's employee-owned chain take its name from?
A struggling movie theatre company
A struggling movie theatre company supplied the name: George Jenkins simply liked the sound of it when he opened his first store in Winter Haven in 1930.
Q 16H-E-B began after Florence Butt's family moved to the dry Texas Hill Country to treat which illness?
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis had left her husband unable to work, so Florence Butt became the family breadwinner, opening a one-room grocery on the ground floor of their home in Kerrville.
Q 17Which New York chain made every Fortune Best Companies to Work For list from 1998 to 2024?
Wegmans
Wegmans, still run by the founding family, has long been praised for staff scholarships and benefits for part-timers; it began in Rochester in 1916 as the Rochester Fruit and Vegetable Company.
Q 18Which Midwestern chain did a Dutch-born barber start in 1934 by filling his empty Michigan storefront with groceries?
Meijer
Meijer: in the Depression Hendrik Meijer could not find a tenant for the space beside his Greenville barbershop, so he stocked it himself, with his 14-year-old son Fred among the first staff.
Q 19Which company bought Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion in 2017?
Amazon
Amazon's purchase took the online retailer into bricks-and-mortar groceries at a stroke; Whole Foods Market had begun in 1980 as a single store in Austin, Texas.
Q 20What was the name of the Austin store that John Mackey opened in 1978 before Whole Foods, spoofing a rival?
SaferWay
SaferWay, a dig at Safeway, was the health-food shop John Mackey opened with $45,000 raised from family and friends; two years later it merged with a rival natural grocer to become Whole Foods Market.
Price Club
Price Club at first sold only to small businesses, then found far more buying clout by admitting selected ordinary members too, the model warehouse clubs still follow; it merged with Costco in 1993.
Q 24After his 1971 kidnapping, Aldi co-founder Theo Albrecht went to court to claim what as a business expense?
His ransom
His ransom: after a payment of millions of marks freed him from his kidnappers, Theo Albrecht argued in court that the money was a tax-deductible business expense; accounts differ on whether he won.
Q 25The brothers who founded Aldi split it into two companies that still trade under which names?
Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd
Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd: Theo took the shops in the north of West Germany and Karl those in the south, and the line between their territories is still nicknamed the Aldi equator.
Q 26Which US grocery chain did Aldi co-founder Theo Albrecht buy in 1979?
Trader Joe's
Trader Joe's was sold to Theo Albrecht by founder Joe Coulombe, yet it has never been merged with America's Aldi stores, which belong to his brother Karl's separate company.
Q 27Which British retailer sued Aldi in 2021, claiming its Cuthbert the Caterpillar cake copied Colin the Caterpillar?
Marks & Spencer
Marks & Spencer said Aldi's Cuthbert rode on the coat-tails of Colin, its chocolate roll cake on sale since 1990; Aldi fought back online under the hashtag #FreeCuthbert.
Q 28In which California city did Joe Coulombe open his first South Seas-themed store in 1967?
Pasadena
Pasadena: Joe Coulombe aimed the store at well-educated, well-travelled shoppers whose tastes mainstream supermarkets ignored; the company's head office is now in nearby Monrovia.
Q 29Before his South Seas rebrand, Joe Coulombe ran which convenience chain, named with a word borrowed from Spanish?
Pronto Market
Pronto Market stores, which Coulombe had run around Los Angeles since 1958, looked too much like 7-Eleven to survive its arrival, so he reinvented them with a South Seas theme.
Q 30What is the popular nickname of Charles Shaw wine, sold only at Joe Coulombe's chain?
Two Buck Chuck
Two Buck Chuck: Bronco Wine bought the name of a bankrupt Napa winery and put it on bottles the chain sold for $1.99 from 2002; the price has risen since, but the nickname stuck.