A man named Joe Coulombe purchased a string of six convenience stores named Pronto and reshaped them into a grocery business that would become the city’s most influential food provider. His early experiments at the new Trader Joe’s were fitful: He sold Bible bread for 69 cents and Playboy at 10 percent off; he developed Kodacolor prints and ran weekly specials on can openers. What Coulombe eventually landed on sounds simple today, but no one had thought of it before: He grafted the gourmet store onto the convenience store onto the health food store onto the liquor store (dropping, of course, the Playboy).

He told anyone who would ask him, “I sell food, where other markets sell groceries,” and beneath one fluorescent lighting system he gathered the cuisines of Mexico, Italy, China, Greece, France, and Japan long before most Angelenos had heard of sushi or tasted pad thai. He sold whole bean coffee years before Starbucks debuted in 1971, and he became the country’s largest importer of Dijon mustard and Brie—the latter because cheese was still considered health food in the ’70s.

In short, Coulombe built a lifestyle acculturation machine the likes of which had never been seen. Walking his bright aisles, shoppers have assimilated unfamiliar cuisines, ambitious food ethics, and new farming practices. If you grew up in L.A. in the ’70s, you were initiated at Trader Joe’s into French wine, English cheese, olive oil, and handmade dolmas. If you moved to L.A. in the 1980s or ’90s, you discovered a store already as iconic as palm trees and sunny days, a clientele as scrappy and aspiring or ill fitting as yourself, and a neighborhood larder that was as cheap as it was cosmopolitan. And if you finally settled down over the past decade to start a family, you watched the store become a moral compass around which a better life can be led buying organic strawberries, cage-free eggs, grass-fed beef, free-trade coffee, soy-based ice cream, kosher guacamole hu...