Morrisons on track for 2,000 Morrisons Daily site target

Morrisons is expected to reach its goal of 2,000 Morrisons Daily stores by the end of the year, despite recent supply challenges and rising costs in the sector.

Speaking at the National Convenience Show, Morrisons wholesale and franchise director Paul Dobson explained how the business was on track to hit its target of having 2,000 stores by the end of 2025.

“Currently, we are at over 1,600 stores and continuing to grow. We had a record quarter one and quarter two in terms of converting new customers over to Morrisons Daily, and we’ve got a pipeline.”

He highlighted potential areas of growth for the business. “We’ve got a little bit of white space around the North East where I think we could do more, especially as it’s an area where our brand is quite strong but we haven’t got as many convenience stores, and there’s a lot of good independent retailers in that region.

“I think Scotland is a really good opportunity for us as well. Morrisons traditionally has good standing in Scotland and we are opening new stores there but I think we’ll look to grow there in the future.”

Morrisons Daily faced some challenges over the past year with supply issues, which were exacerbated by the Blue Yonder outage just before Christmas 2024.

“About this time last year, we embarked on changing our distribution network. And the main driving factors for that were we wanted to improve availability and overall efficiency to give a better service to retailers,” explains Dobson. “Unfortunately, there’s been a few challenges along the way, and not everything went as smoothly as we wanted it to.

“There have been times where our availability, our performance could have been much better. And I think that was exacerbated as we ran into Christmas. Then the group was hit with the impact from the Blue Yonder outage, which was a shock to our system, and it took a bit of time to recover from that.”

Dobson said the business has worked hard to overcome these challenges. “We’re certainly well on the way to recovery. You want to keep pushing and keep pushing, but certainly the last few months have seen the last stages of that network transformation fall into place and we’re starting to get to where we have seen consistent supply consistent performance over the past few weeks and months.”

When asked about challenges facing the sector, costs factored high for Dobson.

I think the biggest challenge for all of us is rising costs. I think our response to that is that there’s a lot of simplification we can do make to make things easier. That includes better use of technology, and there’s lots of technology upgrades to our systems coming in the coming months.

“I think loyalty is going to play a real part, and targeted value and promotion will be better for both consumers and retailers. We see the More card in our convenience business which has happened and the launch of the More card within our franchise partners businesses which is on the way as being really important to that because we can target consumers with personalised loyalty that is more effective for everyone involved and and happily is better for consumers as well.”

He added that he expects the More card to be available to franchise operators by the end of the summer.

Dobson also discussed crime and how Morrisons approach differs depending on the size of store. “In our supermarkets, we’ve been staggered really by the amount of organised crime that we’ve seen and we’ve made some headway over the course of the last 12 months in facing that. We’ve got a great loss prevention team who have really dealt with the organised gangs that sit behind some of the activity we’ve seen the supermarkets.

“In our smaller stores, it’s all about the technology. It’s about cameras, both on our colleagues and in the stores. And some of the most forward-thinking activity tackling crime amongst our independents so there’s some great initiatives out there using some great technology and actually we’re working closely with independents who often take a lead on the issue.”

“I think excellent customer service is one of the best protections. Eyeballing customers, talking to them, making them feel seen and noticed will often interrupt people who intend to do harm. Saying good morning to someone and looking them in the eye before they lift something from a shelf kind of makes them feel seen before the point at which their adrenaline gets up. And that can be some of the most powerful activity. We’ve been training our colleagues to see ahead and really proactively talk to customers which has both a benefit in customer service, but also in tackling crime.”