The Co-op is to challenge takeaway outlets such as Greggs, Pret a Manger and Subway with plans for hundreds of small food shops selling hot pizza, fried chicken and sandwiches.
The first Co-op On The Go store opens in Solihull, near Birmingham, on Thursday and 14 more are planned this year, including five in London.
They will sell ready meals, such as pizzas and lasagne to heat up at home, alcoholic and soft drinks, and essentials such as toothpaste and loo roll alongside staffed hot food counters and food in heated cabinets.
At between 600 sq ft and 1,000 sq ft, the stores will be about a quarter of the size of a typical Co-op but unlike many convenience stores they will not sell cigarettes or vapes. However, the company has developed 35 new products for the new format, such as all day-breakfast meal pots and smoked salmon, egg and spinach pots.
“This isn’t a really small version of a [traditional] Co-op, it’s very different in layout and what we are servicing the customer with,” said Matt Hood, the boss of the Co-op’s grocery chain, which already has more than 2,000 stores.
The bitesize outlets will open from 7am to 7pm, closing three or four hours earlier than its traditional outlets. Many will then operate as “dark stores”, sending out home deliveries of food and groceries into the evening.
The Co-op already delivers groceries to homes via Deliveroo and Uber Eats as well as its own “quick commerce” delivery service and it aims to add hot food to that fast-growing business.
Hood said the format, inspired by similar setups in Japan and China, would help the Co-op grab a bigger slice of the breakfast and dinner market alongside its existing strength in lunch products such as sandwiches. “This feels ripe for us to step into,” he said.
Hood said the Co-op already had a 15% share of the UK’s “food to go” market and the new format was about taking a bigger share in busy urban locations. The first stores are likely to be on high streets but the group is also looking at transport hubs, such as train stations, and could inject aspects of the new format, such as hot food counters, into some of its existing stores.
Some small existing stores in busy locations may also be converted into “on the go’” stores while others are already operating as “dark stores”.
Fewer than 100 stores will continue to operate with just one worker at certain times of day, despite protests from some workers who say the practice leaves them vulnerable to crime, as Hood said this was part of efforts to “continue looking at every way I can to keep all shops open and servicing communities”.
The new format is launching amid fears for the strength of the takeaway food market after Greggs, the UK’s biggest bakery, reported a fall in profits this week as it said shoppers ate less during the recent heatwaves.
Hood said Co-op was still seeing “huge growth in our food to go business”, which was driven by sandwiches and coffee. He said retailers such as Greggs were “always going to be tight on margins and footfall” as they were focused on hot baked products and the Co-op was offering something different.
The Co-op is attempting to bounce back from a serious cyber-attack which affected the availability or products in its stores for several weeks and led to the theft of data, such as names and addresses, for all 6.5 million of the mutual’s members.
Hood said that the Co-op was now “fully recovered” in terms of the service available in stores but that “a lot of stuff is still happening in the background to make sure [the IT] set up is even stronger”.
He added: “It has not been something I would wish on anybody. It’s been a massive learning curve and we will come back out stronger and better than before.”
