How to become a franchise partner
Here at Morrisons Daily, we're committed to bringing you the quality and freshness you expect from Morrisons, right in your local community. In doing so, we proudly offer our nationally recognised and well-loved brand and products to independent retailers to operate as a franchise.
There are several paths to becoming a Morrisons Daily Franchisee; here are the main ones:
- You have a current trading store, under an existing fascia, which you can convert to a Morrisons Daily.
- You have a property which can be re-purposed into a convenience store, such as a pub.
- You are planning to build a new site on either vacant land or through a knockdown rebuild.
Our location planning team will then analyse your store location, looking at things such as size, visibility, local competition, population, demographics and catchment to forecast the viability of what it could achieve as a Morrisons Daily store. Not all locations will be suitable, and we have minimum criteria your store will need to meet before onboarding.
Our criteria - what we look for
We're all about lovely fresh produce and everyday grocery bits. To guarantee your franchise is a real winner and you can offer the best fresh produce and groceries, we need stores to achieve a weekly turnover of about £25,000 as a Morrisons Daily.
Additionally, the location and visibility of the store are key. Ideally, we would look for your store to be on a main route serving a local population of around 2,000 households with good links to residential catchment areas, easy access and pull-up parking. Each site is looked at individually - as in high urban locations, pull-up parking may not be suitable, or in villages the best location may not be on a main route. Local competition within the catchment area is also a vital factor and will be considered when reviewing your store.
We also have specific conditions for the size of our convenience stores. For a neighbourhood store, we require a sales area of at least 1,200 square feet, while a forecourt store should have a minimum of 1,000 square feet. Back-of-house is also important, ensuring enough space for chilled and frozen backstock. For stores with our in-store produced offering, there should be adequate space for a legally compliant kitchen area, typically equating to around 1,000 sqft.
We need to ensure we have the right franchisees representing the Morrisons brand. So, as part of our process, we'll have our operation team mystery shop your current store to give feedback on standards, hygiene and customer service. They will also run some financial and media checks on each prospective franchisee. All of this is to ensure we provide a detailed analysis report for every site we look at.
Our onboarding process
Our onboarding process is industry-leading, and we will help and guide you every step of the way. Once all of our checks and reports are completed, it's time to start your journey of becoming a Morrisons Daily franchisee!
The onboarding process usually takes around 13 weeks, and you will be assigned a dedicated Onboarding Specialist who will guide you through the process step-by-step with regular weekly check-ins. During this time you will be introduced to your Account Manager, who will be on point to support, coach and guide your teams once your store has launched, as well as learn about the training we offer and the support we give. And the best bit? You'll also get to help shape your store, giving us your thoughts on the layout, the look and feel of the place, and what you think should be part of our range.
Launch week
After the onboarding process is complete it is now time to launch your new franchise store with Morrisons Daily! Our new stores generally launch on a Thursday, and if you are a current trading store we will ask that you temporarily close your store from Sunday evening to allow the transformation to take place.
The week prior to the launch our operations team will visit your store to place the first fill opening order. This will then be delivered from Monday of the launch week.
On Launch Week, we will provide a team of merchandisers to fully implement your store layout, marketing and point of sale. Over the course of the next three days the transformation will take place, with the signage company installing the branding, the merchandisers working all the stock to the plans, and the training team (if applicable) upskilling your colleagues on our in-store bakery and hot food operations.
We will support on the launch day with activities such as product samples for customers and a launch support leaflet to all local post codes within the area. Our training team will also be there on the day to help and support you, and also be there the following week to provide hypercare training and support helping with things such as placing orders, actioning bulletins, and implementing routines to make sure that you are operating your store in a safe and legal manner.