How can I become a franchisee?

Typically the store needs to be serving a residential catchment immediately around the store and be positioned with good visibility on a main route picking up the main traffic flows. There are exceptions to this such as highly urban locations where people are mainly on foot, transport hubs or a university campus. Larger supermarkets in villages may well lack visibility but they are the centre of the community and often located in the main car park. We will review your catchment in detail.

Typically for a convenience store we would be looking for stores with a sales area of at least 2,000 sq ft and ideally 2,500 to 3,000sq ft. There may be exceptions in unique locations and for larger stores we can extend up to 12,000 sq ft.

The operation of the stores’ back of house is as important as the sales area. The store has to be set-up to operate with a high fresh food sales mix and be easy to operate in a legally compliant way. For stores with an in-store bakery we look for around 1,000 sq ft although it is possible for some of this to be externally located. We will review every aspect of your store.

Successful Co-op Franchise stores require good access which ideally means a dedicated car park that is easy to reach. We recognise this is not always possible so, as a minimum, it needs to have good on street parking available. There are exceptions such as highly urban areas where the majority of customers are on foot.

The location, size, brand, quality and accessibility of competition in your stores catchment is a really important factor in our assessments. Our location planning team will complete a full analysis of your store catchment when reviewing your store.

It is important to us that we have the right people owning and operating Co-op Franchise stores that share our core beliefs and values as you will be representing our brand. To make sure this happens we will run some financial and ethical background checks on prospective franchisees.