AACS Study Tour 2017

Ben Hagemann
June 6, 2017
C&I Magazine

What’s trending in Melbourne?

Convenience is always been on the move, following the latest trends to lure shoppers into what has come to be seen as an alternative way to shop for sundries and grocery items.

That’s why C&I Week chose to join the Australasian Association of Convenience Stores in its annual Downunder Study Tour, which this year was held in and around the progressive capital city of Melbourne.

After a two-day event spanning eight of Australia’s most innovative convenience stores, it seems space is king in the world of convenience.

Modern store design calls for ample floor space, allowing customers to feel a sense of freedom not afforded by cramped conditions in over-stocked stores. The Foodary, a newly refurbished Caltex brand that will roll out its fifth store in Horsham this week, emphasises this style while borrowing from other café-style outlets that have already seen a great deal of success, such as Urbanista and Jack & Co.

Kate Cahill heads project delivery of the Foodary for Caltex Australia.

Foodary customers at South Yarra location are invited to make use of a Caltex mobile app that allows them to pre-order healthy food for lunch, which means they spend less time browsing the store during the precious minutes of their lunch break: They can literally grab and go.

The feel of the store is light and airy, and certainly conducive to the impression that the food offer allows enough choice for customers to be able to eat healthy day-to-day, all from within a conventional petrol service station.

The outlet is currently awaiting council approval to begin running its in-store partnership with Guzman y Gomez, the up and coming Mexican fast food chain.

By way of stark contract, the Coles outlet in Windsor is designed to make sure customers never forget where they are: COLES. Five foot high illuminated lettering above the entrance to the store provides an ironic accent to the slogan painted above the snack offerings: Big yum at little Coles. Aside from there being very little ‘little’ about Coles, the store maintains the same kind of impression of spaciousness as The Foodary with clever store layout.

Gone are the pallets of firewood and crates of soft drink; service stations now boast clear entrance-ways and a view into the shop.

One of the chief trends we saw repeated throughout the tour was the visual opening up of store frontage. Where service stations were typically stocked out front with firelighters and firewood, gas bottles, crates of soft drink and the like, now we see a clear preference for full glass frontage.

The latest store fronts no longer make use of the frontage for shelving purposes, with both inside and out cleared to make way for the visual appeal of floor to ceiling glass. Although sometimes it does create minor confusion about where the exit of the store may be, the visual effect is quite appealing and contributes the feeling of ‘fresh air’ within a store, which is certainly conducive to the desire to browse and shop beyond the requirements of ‘desperation’.

“It’s destination, not desperation we want,” chuckles Jeff Rogut to me as I plow, half-starved by mid-morning (my own fault for failing to avail myself of the delightful breakfast menu at The Cullen Hotel), through an undercooked snag-in-a-bag I purchased from the Windsor Coles.

The AACS CEO, a tireless campaigner for good business practices within the P&C sector, is possibly the nation’s foremost cheerleader when it comes to the healthy snacking trend, and encouraging our industry to seize upon it.

Hot pastries is one of my favourite snacking categories, but the brightly-coloured tube of pork trimmings wrapped in an oily, doughy strip of puff serves only to stem my craving, without any food for the soul.

But the prices quoted in the Coles outlet are brutal in their competitiveness – 80c fresh coffee, at the touch of a button from sophisticated-looking touchscreen panel. Not being a coffee-drinker, I couldn’t comment on the quality, but I heard no complaints from those seeking their fix.

On the face of it, pricing coffee below $1 seems a tad unscrupulous, especially towards smaller operators that work very hard to achieve good prices and quality for their own customers. But nursing the competition is not the name of the game in convenience retail, and an ongoing fresh coffee price war will only serve to please customers, and stimulate innovation in the more expensive coffee offers at other stores.

From Windsor, we continued our tour to the much maligned, yet highly progressive town of Geelong…