Alfredo Coto was born in Buenos Aires in 1941. His father, Joaquín Coto, was an immigrant from Galicia, Spain, and the owner of a small butcher shop in the Retiro neighborhood of the city. Working alongside his father from the age of nine and helping with local deliveries, Coto became a wholesaler in 1963, purchasing beef cuts and other meat from a kosher butcher who could not use them. He opened his own retail butcher shop in the Boedo district in 1969, which he managed with his wife, Gloria.
Building on the wholesale customer base the couple had developed, Coto owned 20 stores by 1976 and began supplying steakhouses. He bought a cattle ranch in 1978 and, in 1981, a slaughterhouse, becoming his own supplier. However, Coto’s success made him a target, and in 1981 he was held for ransom for 11 days in a kidnapping.
By 1987, he was operating 34 retail stores, each selling around 40 tons of meat and offal per month. That same year, he opened his first supermarket in Mar de Ajó, a popular seaside resort. Coto Supermercados expanded quickly, and in 1992 he launched his first hypermarket. By the late 1990s, the company had opened five shopping malls—each anchored by a Coto hypermarket—as well as a large distribution and wholesale production center in Monte Grande.
The chain, a sole proprietorship, remained privately owned. A Clarín article at the time noted that by 1996, Coto Supermercados had surpassed one billion US dollars in annual sales, with net income exceeding 31 million dollars.
Coto and his company were targeted by extortion attempts in 1996 and 1997, when a group calling itself the Organización Revolucionaria Popular placed bombs in five store locations. Unlike other targets, the Coto chain suffered no physical damage, and the group was later arrested by the police.
Following Carrefour’s acquisition of the Norte supermarket chain in 2000, Coto became the largest domestically owned supermarket retailer in Argentina, and the third overall, behind Carrefour and the Chilean group Cencosud.
As the country’s largest food supplier in a context of chronic inflation and political controversy, Coto was personally criticized at a press conference in November 2005 by then-president Néstor Kirchner. Referring to the businessman, the president cited the company’s slogan “Yo te conozco, Coto” (“I know you, Coto”) when speaking about the role of retailers in rising inflation. Nonetheless, Coto maintained cordial relations with the government and later downplayed inflation as an issue.