I was holding something small in my hand when it hit me.
Last Friday, I sat in a conference room in Warsaw with members of Żabka Group’s technology leadership team, the group that sits under what the company calls its New Growth Engines, or NGEs, segment.
The meeting was organized by Dan Munford, CEO, Insight Research and Global Convenience, and the room included Christian Warning, Managing Partner at The Retail Marketeers, along with peers from Adnoc, Shell, and SPAR, all of us getting an inside look at how one of the fastest-growing convenience retailers in the world thinks about its next phase.
Midway through the meeting, Paweł Jarodźski pulled out his phone, mirrored it on the screen behind him, and started playing a game called “Ninja Hero.”
Then he handed me the controller: a tiny, green, circuit-covered disc shaped like a bottle cap, the kind you’d clip to a keychain. It struck me as a fitting shape for this industry to be handing out, whether anyone at Żabka planned it that way or not. Customers don’t buy it. They earn it: a loyalty reward unlocked after ten purchases, redeemable at a discount.
It’s a game controller. It’s also a brand sponsorship platform. It’s also, Paweł explained, how Żabka talks to a demographic he referred to, sometimes interchangeably with Gen Z, as “Generation Żabka,” a cohort of young Polish consumers who don’t think of the store as a place you stop on the way to somewhere else. They think of it as the place that already knows what they want.
The scale gap between a single independent convenience store and Żabka’s network of more than 12,000 is significant, and that gap is part of why this is worth examining closely: what follows is less a story about one company’s growth than a working model of where convenience retail, and the technology, formats, and economics behind it, is headed next.
What Drives the New Growth Engines (NGEs)?
Before going further, it’s worth explaining what that segment actually is, because the name undersells it. New Growth Engines, NGEs for short, is the internal umbrella Żabka uses for the parts of the business that don’t look like a traditional convenience store at all, but that exist entirely because thousands of physical stores already do.
The retail media network is the clearest example. What started as in-store promotional screens has grown into tens of thousands of digital touchpoints, pulling geolocation data from a data partner alongside Żabka’s own traffic data, to reach a weekly audience the team compared to national television.
Brands can target by proximity and moment: one example given was running ads near high schools during exam periods. That’s a media business built entirely on top of foot traffic Żabka was already generating for free.
(A few figures here are kept general rather than exact; some numbers in this piece are drawn from Żabka’s public filings and investor materials.)
The Żappka app is the second piece, and it functions as connective tissue for everything else. Ten million users, loyalty currency, coupons, and a growing list of third-party integrations: taxi booking, event tickets, diet plans, even pet food. When asked, the team was careful to say it isn’t trying to be a WeChat-style super app.
For now, it’s a single front door for a dozen separate convenience businesses. I left wondering how long “for now” lasts.
The Nano autonomous stores are the third pillar, and the most technically involved: ceiling-mounted cameras building a 3D model of the store to track items by silhouette rather than face, exceeding EU and Poland’s strict privacy laws, with AI-driven dynamic pricing.
Originally a street-level pandemic experiment, the format has since migrated almost entirely into factories and warehouses, where multi-shift staffing creates the steady, contained traffic the model actually needs.
By one engineer’s own account of building the first Nano location starting in April 2021, the team tested several entry methods, walk-through access, gated entry, even sliding doors, before landing on the card-and-app system in place today, a reminder that the polished version customers see now started as a string of unglamorous trial and error.
Three different technologies, one shared logic: take an asset Żabka already has at scale, whether that’s screens, customer attention, or square footage, and squeeze a second business out of it.
From Corner Shop to “Multidimensional Life Center”
The groundwork for that conversation had been laid a few days earlier. At the NACS Convenience Summit Europe itself, Żabka’s Brand and Innovation Director walked our group through what the company calls its four-pillar strategy: Format Evolution, Digitalisation, Integration of Responsibility, and Multi-Directional Development.
I saw pieces of it again on the store tour I led through Warsaw, watching the format play out on actual corners and actual shelves. And it’s the context that made the technology meeting with Dan and Christian’s group land the way it did.
The numbers behind it are hard to ignore. Over 12,300 stores across Poland and Romania. Roughly three new stores opening every single day. PLN 31.1 billion in turnover (roughly $8.4 billion USD, based on a PLN/USD exchange rate of approximately 0.27 per Yahoo Finance, accessed June 22, 2026).
An app with 10 million users handling 4.3 million daily transactions. An IPO in October 2024 that was the fourth-largest ever on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. This is not a small operator’s playbook in scale, but the underlying logic is.
Żabka’s own founders started where most of us did: a corner shop selling groceries. Their stated evolution moves through three stages: corner shop, then “Galaxy” format (ready solutions for the entire day), then “Multidimensional Life Center.” It’s really just a description of expanding the job the store does for the customer.
Breakfast at 8 a.m. Dinner solutions by 6 p.m. A post office function. A pharmacy function. Every stage adds a reason to walk in that has nothing to do with topping off a tank.
That’s the part every independent operator can actually use, regardless of footprint: the store’s job is not “sell convenience items.” It’s “solve today’s problem, repeatedly, until the customer stops thinking about anyone else.”
A Track Record Worth Studying
It’s worth pausing on how Żabka got here, because the growth itself is the part most operators will find hardest to believe. Żabka Group itself states it has been “supporting the Polish economy and local communities since 1998,” when founder Mariusz Świtalski opened the first stores in Poznań.
He wasn’t a first-time operator chasing a hunch. Świtalski had already built and sold Biedronka, the discount grocery chain that’s now one of the largest retailers in Poland, before he ever opened a Żabka.
He launched Żabka the same year that sale closed. From that single-market start, the company built what is now one of the largest convenience networks in Europe, adding roughly three stores a day without the growth outrunning the operation.
That’s the detail that separates this from a typical hypergrowth story: they’ve managed to scale the format while keeping a steady ship in what the company itself calls the “Ultimate Convenience” segment, and by most accounts they do it with a notably low franchisee failure rate for a network this size.PreviousNext
None of that happens by accident, and none of it happens without capital discipline. Żabka has been willing to bet heavily on technology with a clear, provable payoff (the app, the media network, the Nano format) rather than technology for its own sake.
The common thread across every pillar of New Growth Engines is that it has to create real value for four audiences at once: the customer walking in the door, the franchisee running the location, brand partners and advertisers, and now, since the 2024 IPO, the shareholders who took a stake in the company’s public future.
A technology investment that only serves one of those groups doesn’t make it past the pitch stage.
What Scales Down
A few specific moves from the technology team’s session, and the conversation it sparked among the operators in the room, stuck with me because they don’t require Żabka’s balance sheet to copy the principle, even if the execution looks different at our size.
Private label as gap-filling, not margin-grabbing. On the meeting table sat a row of single-serving snack bags (apple chips, almonds, cashews) under Żabka’s own “HAPS!” brand. The story behind them wasn’t about chasing private-label margin. It was that no supplier would package healthy snacks in sizes small enough for an on-the-go customer.
So Żabka built the brand themselves to fill a hole nobody else would fill. That’s a much smaller, much more replicable idea than “build a $31 billion company”: find the SKU your distributor refuses to right-size for your actual customer, and own it yourself.
The ice cup. One of the simplest ideas from the whole trip. A cup of ice, sold so a customer can buy a canned drink and pour it over ice to have something cold to drink immediately. No technology. No capital investment. Just noticing a five-second gap in the customer’s day and closing it.
I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about margin recovery through inventory accuracy and pricing discipline, important work, but this is a reminder that some of the best convenience innovation costs almost nothing and just requires paying attention.
Turning a fixed asset into a revenue line. That retail media network I described above didn’t start as a network. It started as a handful of in-store screens running promotions, the same screens most of us already have somewhere in our stores. Most of us aren’t going to build an advertising business at that scale.
But the underlying question is worth asking about anything already sitting in our stores: is this asset doing one job when it could be doing two?
Responsibility as infrastructure, not marketing. Żabka built its ESG framework around four pillars: Sustainable Lifestyle, Mindful Business Impact, Responsible Organisation, and Green Planet. That framework has earned them a Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award for four consecutive years, the only Polish company to hold it, a AAA MSCI ESG rating, and a Platinum EcoVadis medal for the fourth year running.
I installed EV chargers at 36 Lyn back in 2015 because it felt like the right long-term bet, not because anyone was rating us for it. Watching a company at this scale treat responsibility as a structural pillar rather than a press release reframed something for me: this stuff isn’t separate from the growth strategy. It’s load-bearing.
Where the Comparison Breaks, on Purpose
I want to be honest about where this case study stops being directly transferable. The Nano format I described earlier is genuinely impressive, but it’s not something most independents will deploy, and it’s not something most independents should chase. The lesson there isn’t “go staffless.”
It’s that Żabka tested an idea, found out where it actually worked (closed environments with built-in 24/7 traffic, not open sidewalks), and had the discipline to relocate the format rather than force it onto streets where it didn’t fit.
That discipline is the transferable piece: test an idea, learn where it actually fits, and move there. The hardware isn’t.
The Real Takeaway
Somewhere in that meeting, with Maczfit containers and HAPS! snack bags on the table and operators from Adnoc, Shell, and SPAR leaning in to ask the same questions I was asking, one idea kept coming back to me: Żabka didn’t get to 12,300 stores by deciding to become a tech company.
They got there by refusing to stop asking what “convenience” means to the next version of their customer, then rebuilding the format around the answer, one pillar at a time.
I don’t have 11,000 franchisees or a 10-million-user app. But I have one store, one neighborhood, and a customer whose day I’m trying to make a little easier than it would be without me. That’s the same problem Żabka is solving. They just have more zeros.
I also want to thank Żabka’s team for the openness they showed our group, and Dan and Christian for putting the visit together in the first place.
That kind of welcome isn’t something I take for granted. In my experience, this willingness to share openly, with people who could just as easily be viewed as competitors, is the rule in convenience retail, not the exception.
It’s one of the things that makes this industry almost unique among retail segments, and frankly hard to find in other industries at all: we’ll walk a stranger from another country through our stores and our systems and answer their questions honestly, because we all understand we’re solving the same problem for our own communities.
I don’t know many businesses that operate that way by default.
The question I will bring home from Warsaw isn’t “how do I get bigger.” It’s “what’s the ice cup I haven’t built yet?”
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