Shopper's Stop to serve it hot, too

Plans to open around 100 food outlets in the next 30 months.

MUMBAI: With the battleground shifting from market share to loyalty for organised retailers, Shopper's Stop is taking a gourmet route to enhance the shopping experience of customers.

The retail chain is planning an array of food outlets for its different formats.

Govind Shrikhande, chief executive officer, Shopper's Stop, said, "Currently 2% of customer spend in our chain of stores comes from food items. We aim to increase this to over 5%."

The company, with a turnover of Rs 675 crore last fiscal, owns around 9.8 lakh sq ft of retail space, spanning departmental stores, hyper malls and specialty stores.

Currently, it has three gourmet continental fast food outlets under the Brio brand name and one Indian fast food outlet, Desi Café, inside its retail stores. "We will soon be taking Brio to all the outlets and Desi Café to 20 other retail outlets," said Shrikhande.

The company's departmental stores chain includes 20 Shopper's Stop outlets that it aims to increase to 40 in the next 30 months. It also wants to raise the network of its hyper mall format, HyperCity, from one outlet now to four in the next 15 months. In the specialty stores format, the Crossword network would go up from 30 stores today to 60 in the next 30 months and Mother Care Store from 5 now to 40 stores in the next 45 months.

The company's food business also includes Fresh Basket, a specialty bakery store in HyperCity, which the company plans to take to 10 other retail outlets.

Shopper's Stop is also looking to venture into food court operations in some of its large format stores. These will see the launch of a few more food and beverage brands serving a variety of cuisines.

"In a couple of months, we will be introducing some new restaurant concepts that will offer Chinese and Mexican cuisine. There will be a brand new Indian fine dining restaurant as well," added Shrikhande. The investment required for setting up of these outlets will be in the range of Rs 10 to 15 lakh for the small outlets going up to Rs 35 lakh for the larger formats.

To service these food and beverage outlets, Shopper's Stop has entered into a tie-up with Mumbai-based Blue Foods that operates chains like Copper Chimney, Noodle Bar, Bombay Blues, Cream Centre etc.

"Food helps to enhance the shopping experience of the customers, and thus helps us in building greater loyalty for our stores," he concludes.