How did 2018 shape up for the P&C industry? Convenience World asked key figures to reflect on the past year. This week, 7-Eleven General Manager Marketing Julie Laycock (right).
The past year saw continued change across our industry and our business. Convenience customers’ needs continue to evolve.
They expect more of us and, for us to remain relevant, we must rapidly adapt and shift as a business and as an industry. They want high-quality on-the-go food that’s both tasty and good for you. They want us to help make their lives simpler through digital interfaces and communication.
They expect to have more sustainable choices in their everyday lives as well as convenience and great service. In 2018 we achieved good results thanks to the collective efforts of our franchisees, store team members and support team.
We served more customers in our stores than ever before with more than 230 million transactions in 2018. We opened 25 new stores and continued to invest in our network with a range of refurbishments and upgrades. Our network growth will continue in 2019 with a similar number of new stores set to open.
Our focus on coffee has continued, with our cup counts continuing to grow, supported by the upgrade of more than 160 stores with additional coffee machines. We transformed a number of our CBD stores in the year, with the new formats providing more space for coffee and fresh food, including a specialised bakery range, delivered fresh each day.
We continued to grow our food-on-the-go offer in 2018 through new products and kept up store and product investment. The ½ Price Lunchtime Deal we launched in 2018 was tremendously successful, encouraging customers to consider and regularly use 7-Eleven as their lunchtime destination.
From a new-product perspective, 2018 was a great year for our suppliers and for ourselves. Our customers love trying new things first at 7-Eleven, so we’ll continue to work with our supplier partners to drive incremental growth through new products in 2019. The convenience channel is a great place for customers to experience a new product for the first time.
Digital continued to build in 7-Eleven in 2018. The 7-Eleven Fuel App has now been downloaded 1.5 million times, collectively saving customers more than $8.7 million on fuel purchases. Consumers love the fuel price-lock savings and are taking advantage of the other offers to get great deals on merchandise.
We’re really excited about how digital will provide our customers with new services and support our teams to succeed in future. I’m proud that we’ve made significant progress with our community and sustainability programs in 2018.
7-Eleven and Simply Cups launched a cup-recycling program that has rescued more than 2.5 million cups from landfill. Consumers can recycle plastic straws, and Slurpee and coffee cups, at dedicated recycling stations in 200 7-Eleven stores. We’re working with Simply Cups to grow this program and expect to (approximately) double the number of collection bins in our stores in the next 12 months. 7-Eleven’s new community partnership program, Good Cause, officially launched in 2018. Good Cause’s key areas of focus are food, migrants, youth and local communities. Good Cause gives a home to all our existing charitable relationships but also saw us launch significant relationships with Second Bite and AMES. It adds projects that will see our team, as an organisation and as individuals, inject greater capacity into incredible charities doing great work for Australia.
In 2019 we have an exciting opportunity to continue our growth as we work towards our vision of being the best in Australia at meeting the ever-changing needs of the convenience customer.
To do this, we’ll be opening more stores, transforming existing ones, delivering enhanced value through great-value promotions and new products, and continuing to improve the way we do business, to deliver extraordinary moments for our customers every day.
