After shaking up the coffee market by selling coffee and sandwiches for NIS 5, Cofix founder Avi Katz will soon open a supermarket chain that will offer food items at the exact same price.
According to Katz, the first branch will open in April 2015, and the plan is to open 20 branches in the first phase, which will be called “Super Cofix.” All of the first five branches will open in Tel Aviv.
Katz says that the chain will take the 600 leading food products and sell each of them for a uniform price of NIS 5. Half of the products in the chain will be food products, including staples such as beef, milk, canned food, vegetables, fruit, and more. 30% of the products will be cleaning, hygiene, and cosmetics products, and 20% will be non-food items, including basic housewares, and the like.
“We feel that the market is ripe for a revolution that will turn the complaints into buying power,” says Katz, “I want to take the high-cost-of-living virtual protest and put it on a practical track. Poor people need to buy cheap, rich people like to buy cheap. The potential in Israel is for 100-200 stores that will turn over between NIS 800 million and NIS 1.5 billion annually. Our target market is young consumers who will create savings for themselves by buying small quantities of the specific items they need. This model will reduce waste in the chain.”
The idea is to build small, 150-400 square meter, branches that will serve as a local supermarket in city centers and in large neighborhoods. The locations of the branches have not yet been decided upon.
In any event, this is not a supermarket that will offer a full range of products, and it is already clear that the selection will change in accordance with agreements with manufacturers and suppliers, who, according to Katz, will contribute to the process and will offer products at attractive and fair prices without unnecessary mark-ups to middle-men.
The new chain is, nonetheless, committing to include most of the categories that a household needs.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on November 10, 2014
Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2014