Supermarket
A controlled store of parts that the next process takes from as it needs them, with the supplying process making only enough to refill it. The supermarket icon is a box open on the left with shelves across it.
Easily confused with
How to read it
The Lean Enterprise Institute defines a supermarket as the place where a set standard inventory is kept to supply downstream processes. As an item is taken, a signal to make more, such as a kanban card or an empty bin, goes back to the supplying process. The UW-Stout study calls it a kanban stockpoint: downstream customers come to pick out what they need, and the upstream work centre restocks it. The EPA’s toolkit labels it a controlled inventory of parts, joined to the next process by a withdrawal arrow, the pull of materials.
Also searched as: kanban supermarket, supermarket icon vsm, supermarket symbol, value stream map supermarket.
Where the name comes from
The Lean Enterprise Institute records that Toyota installed its first supermarket in 1953, in the machine shop of its main plant in Toyota City, and that Taiichi Ohno took the idea from photographs of American supermarkets with goods on shelves in fixed places.
Look-alikes
An Inventory triangle triangle is stock with no limit or signal. A FIFO lane holds parts in a fixed order, oldest first.
Read next
- Next in Value stream mapping symbolsFIFO laneA lane between two processes that holds a limited number of parts in the order they arrived, first in, first out. The icon is two parallel lines with FIFO written between them, often with the maximum quantity.
- The same shape in South American flagsFlag of EcuadorEcuador’s flag is yellow, blue and red in horizontal stripes, the yellow twice as wide as each of the others, with the national arms in the centre on official flags: a condor above an oval showing the Chimborazo volcano, a river and a steamship. The flag law gives the colours no meaning; El Universo gives the usual reading, yellow for the mineral and fertile soil, blue for the sky and sea, red for the blood of Ecuador’s heroes.
More value stream mapping symbols
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols drawn with lines or squares and rectangles.
Sources
- Supermarket, Lexicon term, Lean Enterprise Institute, Definition
- Value Stream Mapping at XYZ Company, Madhubala Rauniyar, MS research paper, May 2007, Appendix A: Value Stream Process symbols, University of Wisconsin-Stout (MINDS@UW), Appendix A, Supermarket; Material Pull
- Lean and Environment Toolkit, Version 1.0, Chapter 3 and Appendix A (Common Icons Used in Value Stream Maps), US Environmental Protection Agency, Appendix A, Common Icons Used in Value Stream Maps
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
Added .