The story
Founded by Gerhard Halfred von Koch on Sep 5, 1899.1
KF was founded in 1899 by 41 local consumer co-operatives in order to support them with information and education of store managers and board members. Soon KF also became responsible for common procurement of goods. In the 1930s, KF expanded rapidly during the management of Albin Johansson, setting up various industries in order to support the co-operative grocery stores. From 1950 to 1970, KF was at the forefront of the Swedish retail trade by developing new and bigger store formats and it was one of the major business groups in Scandinavia. In the beginning of the 1990s, as a response to a financial crisis, KF decided to sell out all its industries and focus on retail trade only.
Around the year 2000, KF formed the retail chain Coop Norden along with its Nordic co-operative counterparts, Danish FDB and Norwegian Coop NKL. In 2002, KF bought a 50% share in BOL Sweden from Bertelsmann. Due to poor financial results in Coop Norden, the owners decided to renationalize the operation of the stores in 2007. In July 2021, Coop was temporarily shut down by a ransomware attack on Kaseya software services.
From Wikipedia’s article on Kooperativa Förbundet, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4