Earlier this summer I admired the logo for the southern American supermarket chain Food Lion, a proud blue lion in a square lozenge.  I was enchanted by its graphic clarity and its Euro-regal pretensions.  It all seemed a bit much, and also exactly right, for a supermarket that stocked buckets of lard and a thousand varieties of barbecue sauce.  So I was surprised to spot the logo gracing a supermarket called Delhaize in Brussels.  It turns out that Food Lion is a subsidiary of the Belgian conglomerate (also called Delhaize) that owns the chain.  When they built the Food Lion brand they reused the same logo.

I imagined that the Food Lion lion had been concocted, “Mad Men” style, by an enterprising, low-ranking manager at the American headquarters in Salisbury, North Carolina sometime around 1962.  In a way the lion has become the mascot for my peripatetic summer.  What was there tying together my small-town Arkansas days and big-city European adventures?  “Le Lion,” was right there, all along, looking over me, and keeping me well.

Food Lion is my new favorite grocery store.  Based in Salisbury, North Carolina, the chain has over 1,300 locations throughout the southern states.  Inside are all the products you’d expect, as well as specialty items not available in northern stores, like gallon-sized tea bags, sheets of beef jerky, and three flavors of instant grits (butter, cheddar, and American cheese).  The aisles at Food Lion are ten-feet wide and the linoleum floors shine like marble.  The cashiers ring up the discount price before asking if you have the insiders’ saving card, and then they offer to carry your bags to the car.

The finest thing about Food Lion is its logo, a squarish crest with the stylized profile of a lion standing (and roaring) above the store’s name, which is rendered in a slender, elegant font.  It’s not a cuddly storybook lion or a ferocious wild lion that’s pictured, but a heraldic Anglophilic lion, a bit like the old Pringle of Scotland dragon.  The logo is simple and enigmatic.  It could stand for for any entity: a rugby team, a marching band, or an investment bank.  For this regional grocery store designers fashioned a corporate identity that confers a genuine sense of pride.