The upscale grocery chain, Waitrose, vowed to significantly expand by opening 100 convenience stores in the next five years. Along with this, it will also renovate the existing outlets and introduce a raft of new services for making shopping easier. In a £1 bln investment to fight for market share and better service delivery, the company will open more outlets.

It’s going to be a big change for the trendy grocery store Waitrose. They’re planning on opening 100 new convenience stores in as many as five years. This is part of huge investment worth over £1 billion. That alone would have been enough, but they also intend to open up to four new large supermarkets and refurbish some older stores to make them even better.

First off the blocks is a redeveloped store on Finchley Road in north London, which opens on Wednesday. And that’s not all. Before the year is out, Waitrose will open its first new store in six years in Hampton Hill, west London.

James Bailey, the executive director of Waitrose, shared the big plans of the company: many Little Waitrose shops—smaller convenience stores—would open up in the next five years, with some perhaps even relocated from current sites. Bailey also highlighted that they are renovating their older stores, filling them with more of the things people love: fresh food, helpful service, and counters where you can get fresh meat and fish.

Waitrose is investing in technology to ensure its shelves are well-stocked. The chain has suffered some recently from items going out of stock, owing to a combination of IT problems and a warehouse fire. But Bailey said it was working hard to rectify those issues and make shopping with Waitrose seamless.

The new design of the Finchley Road store, which is due to reopen shortly, has been tailored to fit the needs of the customer. It has larger fresh meat and fish counters, which have always been a hit with shoppers. It includes a new out-of-hours pickup point for online shoppers, making it easier than ever to pick up orders at a time that works for them. Bailey believes these will set Waitrose on a “real positive upward trajectory.”

The big expansion comes when Waitrose is finally bouncing back from some really tough times: it has faced a lot of competition from its immediate rival Marks & Spencer, in particular during the cost-of-living crisis when shoppers were looking for cheaper options. But things are starting to look up. According to Kantar, which analyzes shopping data, Waitrose recorded its strongest growth in the three months to August 4th. This was the strongest it had been since November 2023.

The timing is also well-placed because Waitrose is under a new leader. Jason Tarry had spent two decades at Tesco and has been appointed chair of the John Lewis Partnership, which owns Waitrose. He has the mandate of reverting the company to a more retail-focused one. The shift happens after a period of turbulence under the previous chair, Sharon White, who had to handle fairly some challenging times at the company. While White did manage to return the company to profitability, the group could not provide an annual bonus to its workers, part-owners of the company.

White had also put in a target for the firm to derive 40% of its profits from non-retail businesses by 2030, a concept that was equally criticized. Many thought that the company was losing focus on its retail brands by investing too much energy on projects like building homes to let and further developing financial services.

Bailey, however, remains sanguine about the future. He feels the changes being made in their stores will further enhance the shopping experience of customers. Work on Finchley Road is only the starting point. This store shall host all the quality products that customers expect, besides hosting new concepts that have been specially designed based on how people like to shop. These new ideas will be tried out here and, if successful, will be propagated through other stores across the country.

Some of the new features include a hot Wok counter enabling customers to leave the store with their ready-to-eat food, Crosstown doughnuts located in the in-store bakery section, and a hatch that customers will use to pick up their fast-track online orders even out of hours when the store closed. As a first for any UK store, there will be a dedicated space within the store for click-and-collect online orders.

It will also host a dry-aged beef cabinet and a section dedicated to parmesan cheese. The store in Finchley Road already ranks as one of Waitrose’s biggest sellers of parmesan – accounting for nearly 15 percent of all the parmesan it sells.

With all these exciting changes in its pipeline, it’s patent that Waitrose is truly determined to deliver the shopping experience par excellence. While it is new stores and refurbs of older ones, innovative services are setting up Waitrose for an extremely bright future in which its customers have everything at their fingertips.