Award-winning forecourt couple the Touts have revealed plans to expand from three to 10 forecourts, with sites replicating their successful community hub model at their flagship site in Cleeve, Bristol.
Their “neighbourhood centres” will combine elements of their wider Somerset headquartered business, which in addition to the forecourts comprises a pub, restaurant, hair salon, and three standalone pharmacies.
The forecourts will develop the ethos that the petrol retailing business is known for: being passionate about food, with hundreds of local products, while offering a supermarket value experience, backed by a loyalty card, say husband and wife Jonathan and Zena.
The Touts outlined their strategy during the first in a series of On The Road with Forecourt Trader events, hosted by the couple, which nine leading forecourt operators attended. The inaugural meeting, which included a behind the scenes tour of the site, was sponsored by Henderson Technology and PDI Technologies.
“We aim to build the most impressive local centres in the Southwest and are looking to grow to 10 of these neighbourhood centres, with the hope of getting to five in the next couple of years,” Jonathan told the gathering.
Two sites – at Taunton and an undisclosed location – are currently going through the planning process, which Jonathan described as the biggest challenge. Taunton is now into its fourth year of seeking approval, with the other addition just a few months in.
“The dream is to build sites with everything in them. One of them will have everything under one roof, and the other one will have everything bar a pharmacy,” added Jonathan, who plans to install jet washes, but not EV charging at the locations.
“We are passionate about building property and businesses that are truly special and unique focusing on local centres serving their community with as many services that people need regularly and in person in the most convenient location – not competing with online or Amazon,” he added.
The new sites will be “mostly be like a supermarket, fairly like a farm shop, little like a discounter, and not like a corner shop” – a philosophy that has shaped the Touts’ forecourt business.
The outlets will also be “warm, genuine, flexible, energetic, clear, human and colourful”, and definitely not “corporate”, and with a focus on being “fun” – other criteria the Touts have formulated for their business, with they said their staff central to this.
Jonathan talked about how the couple established their brand identity at their three existing forecourts in Cleeve, Langford and Nailsea. “The most important thing was getting a baseline of what we wanted the stores to look and feel like, then everything else followed,” he said.
He added: “We used no external marketing agencies, and Zena, who led the re-branding, studied geography at university. We focused on what we liked and were passionate about rather than what an agency thought a shop could be.”
To back its claim about being passionate about food, the business set about signing up local suppliers. “We decided the big way to be different to the multiples was to use local food as a unique selling point,” said Jonathan. “We had talked about it for the past 20 years, only in the last five I’d say we have done it properly,” said Jonathan.
Now the Cleeve site, for example, gets 20% of its shop sales from products sourced from Bath and Bristol postcodes. Jonathan said 639 products out of 4,000 stocked at Cleeve are local, from 112 suppliers which the business mainly deals with directly rather than using wholesalers.
It is a lucrative approach. Some £31,235 worth of local strawberries were purchased at Cleeve in the past six months, equivalent to 10,000-plus punnets, and the top selling line across its three stores for nine months of the year. Meanwhile, its biggest locally supplied product, flowers, in Cleeve, turn over £50,000 in sales.
“We are not just working with local suppliers so that we can say that we like local, and that you should shop locally. They really do earn us a big chunk of our money,” said Jonathan.
The Touts also wanted to give something back to the local community. They made a pledge to provide one million meals to families in need. The business has provided 324,000 meals so far through facilitator Fairshare. It funds this project by donating a percentage of all local food and own-brand products bought using its loyalty card to the charity.
The loyalty card, powered by PDI Technologies using Henderson Technology’s Edge-POS system, has also been a great success with 42,000 registered customers, and 58% – or 24,000 people – active in the past 12 months.
Significantly the initiative has given the business 31,000 contactable email addresses to approach with bespoke offers, or to remind lapsed purchases of fuel for example that they can get 2p per litre off just by presenting their card instore. Such mailshots can bring back £4,500 worth of fuel business, the month after the mailer is sent out, said Zena.
Some 57% of shop sales and 64% of fuel sales go through the loyalty card, and card holders typically spend £1.67 more per transaction than customers who have not signed up. The open rates for the loyalty card marketing emails is 46%.
Reducing food waste is also central to the company’s ethos and vision, said Jonathan. He enthused about the Too Good To Go app. And he pointed out that food waste from the shops and The Maple restaurant at Cleeve is sent to the Nailsea Community Group foodbank, or to a local plant which digests the food into methane for energy use. Also, said Jonathan, the Henderson Technology epos system’s assisted ordering has made a “huge difference” to fresh food waste – which is down to 1-4% across the stores.
For all of these achievements, stressed Jonathan, Tout employees played a huge part. “We are grateful to the fantastic teams and people who keep all areas of the business running day in day out, as without them none of this would be possible,” he said.
- Our inaugural On The Road with Forecourt Trader event was attended by: Tom Buckley at Pricewatch Group, Ian Cawley at Park Garage Group, Seb Hawtree at Hawtree & Sons, Daniel Panormo from Plaistow Broadway, Nakendram (Theepan) Pitatheepan from Sterling Petroleum, Jamie Sejpal at Platinum Retail, Patrick Sewell at Sewell on the go, Prem Uthayakumaran from Prehybrid, and Jamie Wheeler from Tankerford.
