KE ICELANDTOUR

Inside Ashford's new Iceland store at Ashford Retail Park

Transcript

00:00 It's very similar to an Iceland in some aspects in terms of our product ranges are quite similar.

00:05 What you will find in a food warehouse is much better value packs and bigger deals.

00:09 So what we tend to find is our high street stores are serving a customer base which is

00:13 probably topping up their shop or they're just popping in on the high street buying

00:17 smaller items.

00:19 With these ones on these kind of commercial sites, they're really drive to destinations

00:24 and this is where people are doing bulk purchasing, filling their larder cupboards with some of

00:28 the great value stuff that we sell.

00:30 When Ashford started expanding we were looking for a food warehouse and it was just finding

00:34 a site that was in the right location.

00:37 Obviously there were specifics about how big it had to be and those units aren't always

00:41 up for grabs and this one we'd been looking for quite some time and this one kind of landed

00:46 in our laps.

00:48 So since I first had this area we've opened one in Dover and we've opened a site in Fannet

00:54 and this was one that was always been on the cards that we wanted to have a site for a

00:58 food warehouse in Ashford.

00:59 Especially because Ashford over the last five to ten years I think has just massively grown

01:03 in every direction and we really felt there was an opportunity to kind of maintain our

01:08 high street store and then grow the business with this out of town proposition as well.

01:13 We currently have sort of getting on for a thousand shops and by far the majority of

01:16 those are high street shops and they're a really, really important part of the business.

01:20 This is about serving a different customer really.

01:22 If stores are taking money and our customers want to visit those stores and keep them open

01:26 then we will keep them open.

01:27 So it's really just a case of maintaining sites that are needed and wanted by our customers.

01:33 And I think Ashford High Street has a very different purpose to the store that we're

01:37 opening now.

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