99 Ranch Market is one of the largest supermarket chains of Asia located in the United States. The chain functions mostly on the West Coast particularly in California and its stores are located in Nevada, Arizona, Washington and Georgia as well. As it was founded by a Taiwanese and since a sizeable portion of products is imported from Taiwan, it is also regarded as a Taiwanese market. It has established its own production facilities along with processing factories and farms and provides a wide range of products like grocery, snacks, deli, liquor, bakery, frozen foods, seafood, dairy, produce, meat and pharmacy.
99 Ranch Market is popular among its non-Asian customers as Ranch 99. It runs a joint venture with the Chinese Canadian T & T Supermarket chain in Canada with its stores located in the Vancouver region and also in Toronto, Edmonton and Calgary. A Taiwanese expatriate named Roger H. Chen set up the first market in Little Saigon in Westminster, California in 1984. Again in 1987, another market was opened in Montebello but it is now closed. Initially it was called as 99 Price Market but later it was renamed as 99 Ranch Market. Its head quarters are located in Buena Park in California and its slogan is For 100 We Try Harder.
99 Ranch Market has developed its own production facilities in China as well and has undertaken quality control measures so that China products are in compliance with FDA norms and standards. The chain sells a wide variety of imported merchandise and food products from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, specially Thailand and Vietnam. Mandarin Chinese is the lingua franca of 99 Ranch Market, as it provides its services mainly to the Chinese Americans. However, in stores PA announcements are made in several languages like Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese Chinese and English, while some also use Vietnamese.
Shun Fat Supermarket and Hong Kong Supermarket chains are the two important competitors of 99 Ranch Market in Southern California as they are situated in the near by regions of the market. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Lion Supermarket and Marina Foods chains and also some of the Cantonese Chinese grocery stores give tough competition to the Supermarket. Again in the Silicon Valley, its rivals are several big Asian supermarkets. Groceries and supermarkets like Uwajimaya, regional Korean groceries and other local Vietnamese groceries in the Seattle metropolitan area give competition to it.
The stores of 99 Ranch Market have aisles which are wider in size and are not as cluttered as most of the Chinese markets. It accepts credit cards for bills exceeding $5. It used to send out mail circulars with coupons, promote sweepstakes and operated a membership VIP card program, but all these promotional activities and programs are stopped to charge same price from all customers. It also operates big advertising campaigns along with radio ads in Southern California on Chinese-language radio and in-print ads in Chinese-language newspapers like TVB USA and World Journal.
99 Ranch Market
