Almost three years after its acquisition by Borletti group with the French funds Antin and Icamap, Grandi Stazioni has doubled its surface for food and catering activities. This was stated by Maurizio Borletti , president of Grandi Stazioni Retail, speaking during the first Global Food Service Forum organized inMilan by A4D-Appetite for Disruption in collaboration with Lazard and the Food Service magazine.
“The company acquired in 2016 – said Borletti – was very different from the current one. We started with about eighty employees and a fairly passive job, substantially Grandi Stazioni Retail limited itself to re-letting spaces and inside there were old and outdated concepts, which lived on income due to the existence of long-term contracts. Today we have almost 400 employees, the stores are much more important and we present a much broader offer “.
In particular, Borletti decided to focus on food, as he had done at the time when his group was the owner of Rinascente. “Making a whole plan dedicated to food in Rinascente seemed crazy … today over 8 million people arrive on the top floor and the project is working very well. In Grandi Stazioni we immediately saw that there was a very important gap between catering and food compared to the overall offer, with less than 10% of the spaces allocated. Moreover, those who worked in food had little motivation because they earned good without too much investment in innovation, precisely because of the existence of those old and outdated concepts”.
The first move was to reserve more space for food & beverage. “Today we are already over 20%,” says Borletti, also recalling that Grandi Stazioni Retail has not limited itself to using the spaces inside the railway stations, but also those with access from outside. “We are trying to reclaim what was around the station, requalifying certain areas from the degradation they had precipitated.” The most significant examples are those of Rome and Milan, with the opening of the Central Market format already occurred at Termini and scheduled for the year at Centrale.
Borletti highlighted the main criterion of the choices made by Large Retail Stations. “We are trying to segment the offer based on the principle of excellence. If a sign is present inside Grandi Stazioni, it must be with its latest version and it is rightly so. Because we have 750 million passengers a year and when such a large number of potential customers attend a project, that project must be the last version developed by the company that owns it.
As for costs, the president of Grandi Stazioni Retail says: “We are expensive and we will always be more expensive. So to stay with us you need to be very efficient and demanding. In fact the best ones want to be present by us, because they earn more than in other locations. It is a good skimming and an excellent training ground for the development of your brand “.
