If you’ve always wanted to own the brand name of a venerable but defunct supermarket company, now is your opportunity. After A&P filed for bankruptcy for the second time in five years and the last time ever, the company is getting rid of the last of its assets. The leases and locations of individual stores were sold off to rival grocery chains, and now what’s left are brands, customer names, and e-mail addresses.

Brands for sale include A&P, Pathmark, Waldbaum’s, Super Fresh, Food Basics, Best Cellars, and all of the company’s current and former in-house brands, which could be mined for their nostalgia value.

Another useful resource to mine would be customer lists: the chains have millions of customer records (presumably from loyalty cards) and hundreds of thousands of e-mail addresses that would be most valuable to another grocery chain in the Northeast. Any promotional mailings from the eventual buyer of this list would most likely be opt-in.

It’s not out of the question that someone could buy one of these brands cheap now and exploit it later: A&P still has good brand recognition nationwide even after the chain shrank significantly.

A&P puts brand, data on the block [Supermarket News]

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