CFAO has launched its first Supeco discounter/cash and carry store in Dakar just months after launching its first Carrefour supermarket in Senegal. The new store, in the shell of the iconic El Mansour cinema building, is an innovative addition to Senegal’s grocery retail landscape.
In January CFAO has revealed that it plans to launch 8-10 Supeco stores across Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon and Senegal. In Côte d’Ivoire, market leaders Prosuma and CDCI both operate hybrid retail/wholesale stores. In Cameroon, Supeco will go head to head with Casino’s Bao cash and carry format, launched in March 2018. But in Senegal, Supeco offers an alternative to the dominant Auchan store network, which is a more mainstream supermarket format.
Supeco is an emerging Carrefour brand in Spain, Eastern Europe and Brazil. But it is not implemented uniformly. In Spain and Eastern Europe it is used to compete head to head with discounter Lidl. Carrefour’s partner in Morocco, Label’Vie, is trialling a much smaller Supeco format to compete with Turkish small format discounter BIM.
The Senegal launch is the first of three planned stores in the country in 2019. The El Mansour site is around 1,000m². Long after the cinema’s heyday in the 1960s and 1970s and when it had closed, it spent more than a decade languishing and became a bit of a junk yard. Subsequently, it was supposed to be turned into a shopping centre. The store will be open seven days a week.
CFAO is aiming to launch stores between 750m² and 1000m², in high traffic, densely populated areas. Stores will carry 2,500 SKUs, including some Carrefour private label. CFAO is marketing the use of pallets, limited air conditioning and decor as a virtue, telling consumers it is passing on cost savings to them. Elsewhere, Supeco stores can stock 3,500-4,000 – suggesting that CFAO has room to move on the proposition in due course.
