TradeNames: From humble beginnings to being the 'backbone of food retailing in Ireland', the Musgrave Group has adapted to the times and prospered, writes Rose Doyle.

Brothers Thomas and Stuart Musgrave weren't without ambition when they set up shop at 103 North Street, Cork city, in 1876. Though they were young, Thomas was 25, Stuart just 18, they had already been hard at it, trading in the city as Musgrave Brothers. They choose their time to set up shop wisely and well.

Change was in the air and across the commercial landscape. The telephone had come into being that year, a burgeoning railway system meant goods could be transported more easily and a lot more cheaply, transatlantic cables had recently made the telegraph a way of life.

The brothers' impeccable timing meant that by 1887 they had opened a second shop at 15 Grand Parade, had a total capital of £10,454. 12s. 3d. and a deed of partnership declaring their business would be in "the trade and business of grocers".

Within seven years that business had become a limited one, the articles of association allowing for the buying and selling of tea, coffee, sugar, spice, fruit, olive oil, confectionery, flour, iron and hardware, fish and ice, stationery and haberdashery.

The company, with an early and deliberate emphasis on fair dealing and hard work, moved onwards and forward to the 20th and 21st centuries, arriving with something like inevitability at its latter day role as Ireland's largest grocery and food distributor.

"Today's Musgrave Group," says Edel Clancy, Musgrave's director of communications, "is wholly owned by family (75 per cent) and employees (25 per cent) - three branches of the family are on the board. It owns a number of retail brands (including Supervalu and Centra) and has operations in both the Republic and in Northern Ireland, Britain and Spain. Together with its retailers, Musgrave employs more than 40,000 people. Over 24,000 of these are in the Republic, which makes us one of the largest private employers in the state."

There's more. The company operates in five divisions: Musgrave Supervalu Centra; Musgrave Wholesale Services (681 stores); Musgrave Budgens Londis (2,261 stores in the UK); and its wholesale operation Dialsur in Spain. All a long way from 1876 and 103 North Street, Cork. A long way, too, from the days when a trio of formidable sisters married the sons of the founding brothers and put their mark on the business and family.

The Roberts sisters were daughters of a Methodist family from Enniskillen and for nigh on 60 years were influential in keeping both family and business together.

In the beginning were Margaret and Jane, who married John L and Charlie Musgrave, sons of Thomas. Then came Mae, who married Stuart's son, Stuart Musgrave Jnr.

A fin de siècle description of the then Musgrave premises at 84 Grand Parade (now part of the Queens Old Castle shopping centre and where the company moved in 1894) tells of a frontage with the name Musgrave Brothers Limited with the legend 'Expert Tea Blenders' in gold lettering underneath. There was a window to either side of the shop door, one filled with a display of teas, the other with lettering announcing that this was a wholesale and retail grocers.

All was very traditional in the inside with a counter running the length of the shop and, behind it, a wall lined with drawers and shelves.

The latter held such as pearl barley, caraway seeds and rice while the shelves, along with jars and tins of food, held the glass bottles of sweets which would hold their poplar place for another half century. Sugar was stored in a vast bin at one end of the counter while at the other end loose biscuits filled biscuit tins.

The wholesale part of the company operated from the same building and was divided into fancy and grocery departments. Variety being the order of the day, the latter was where retailers could purchase axle grease, butter colouring, camomile flowers and, in those pre- refrigeration days, waterglass (to preserve eggs), butter preservative and lemonade crystals. The fancy department carried toiletries, toys, clocks, stationery, padlocks - even penknives and ointments.

The brothers couldn't have foreseen the political turmoil of the 1880s, when land wars and agitation affected a business dependent on farmers as customers.

But Musgraves, with the company's guiding principles of "long-term relationships, honesty, achievement, hard work and not being greedy", carried diligently on to move resolutely from the 19th to the 20th century with a 1899 turnover of £67,000.

Musgrave, through the years since then, has dipped with acumen into many and varied businesses. The Metropole Hotel, a Cork institution and in its day "the height of late 19th century luxury", belonged to Musgrave from its beginning and for 80 years until, in 1977, it was sold to a consortium of Cork businessmen.

Hotel-owning apart, Musgrave also operated in the early and late 20th century commercial worlds of tea blending, shop fitting, construction, sweet manufacturing, laundry, bacon and frozen foods.

In 1925, by which time the company was almost exclusively a wholesale business, Musgrave moved its headquarters to Cornmarket Street and into what, at the time, was the country's first large, purpose-built grocery warehouse.

Huge for the time, it held more than a million cubic feet of warehouse and office space, gave Musgrave the edge on competitors and was where it would stay until 1965. The years between were not easy but, by the 1930s, Musgrave Brothers was selling to retailers all over Munster, as well as to customers in Galway and Kilkenny.

There were between 85-90 people employed by Musgrave in 1948.

The legendary John L Musgrave, who ran the company through two world wars and for more than 40 years, had foreseen the coming of the second World War, with all its consequences, and in the years before 1939 bought in vast quantities of tea, sugar and spices. By this, and other means, did the company survive wars, and beyond them to the 1950s.

John Musgrave took over the company from his father John L in 1955. The company hadn't changed much in 30 years but, by the end of 1958, it had made the radical decision to adopt a group trading system and, three years later, introduced the first "cash and carry wholesale self-service" in Cornmarket Street.

Change thus established, the company moved at a steady trot through the rest of the 20th century. In 1962, with the fashion for self-service and supermarkets growing, Musgrave opened the first VG franchise store.

In 1979, when the company launched SuperValu and Centra, 47 former VG and Shoprite stores signed up. Four years later, in 1983, Musgrave opened a cash and carry in Belfast. Eleven years later, in 1994, the company expanded into Spain and bought 17 of Dialsur's cash and carry outlets as well as 46 retail food stores.

Within two years, with the purchase of four shopping centres and a supermarket, the company had expanded significantly too in Northern Ireland.

As the millennium dawned, Musgrave bought Budgens in the UK and, in 2003, bought Londis in the UK.

Just last year, its wholesale services division bought Variety Foods and C & R Frozen Foods Ltd.

So it's a 21st century company, one which chief executive officer Chris Martin says is "the backbone of food retailing in Ireland". He points out, too, that the "local, independently-owned stores serving over a quarter of the Irish grocery market is a phenomenon unheard of elsewhere in Europe or the US. We know that local ownership makes for better service, better community contribution, better local investment and job creation."

The company's challenge, he says, "will be our ability to understand and respond to rapid change. This will determine our success in meeting the needs of the consumer of the 21st century."