16 Facts About Food Lion

Food Lion is an American regional grocery store chain headquartered in Salisbury, North Carolina, that operates over 1100 supermarkets in 10 states of the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern United States .

In 1983, the company changed its name and branding to Food Lion to allow it to expand into regions where Food Town was already in use by unrelated stores.

Food Lion was founded in 1957 in Salisbury, North Carolina, as Food Town by Wilson Smith, Ralph Ketner, and Brown Ketner.

Food Lion name was adopted in 1983; as Food Town expanded into Virginia, the chain encountered several stores called Foodtown in the Richmond area.

Food Lion continued their expansion throughout the late 1980s, opening hundreds of stores in existing markets such as the Carolinas and the Virginias, and entering new markets such as Georgia and Maryland.

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The small, lackluster Food Lion stores were beginning to compete with national retail leaders, such as Albertsons, Kroger, Tom Thumb, and Jewel-Osco, all of which were already well-respected in the Southwest and which operated larger stores with more features, but the effects of the devastating ABC report could not be denied, and sales and revenue plummeted.

That same year, Food Lion remodeled 68 stores in the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina market, followed by 65 stores in the Charlotte area in 2004.

In late 2013, Food Lion introduced a new concept and decor at a store in Concord, North Carolina.

In July 2016, as part of the corporate merger between Delhaize and Ahold, Food Lion was required to divest 61 locations to a variety of competitors including Supervalu and Weis Markets in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia to satisfy the Federal Trade Commission's review of the two parent companies merger.

Later that year, Food Lion began remodeling 93 of their stores in the Piedmont Triad region.

Food Lion spent seven years attempting to establish a presence in Bangkok, Thailand, starting in 1997.

Since 2000, Food Lion and Feeding America have partnered to reduce food waste by donating more than 300 million meals to Food Lion's communities through their food rescue initiative.

Ultimately Bottom Dollar Food Lion was shuttered and the stores sold to Aldi in early 2015.

Food Lion stores have the My Essentials brand, as well as the Hannaford brand.

The footage was then featured in a segment on the news magazine Primetime Live, in which Food Lion employees described unsanitary practices, which included bleaching discolored, expired pork with Clorox and repackaging expired meats with new expiration dates, and the use of nail polish remover to remove the expiration dates from dairy item packages.

Food Lion did this because the company was not contesting the truth of anything ABC reported in the broadcast.