Poland: franchise concept for wholefood stores

A franchise concept is getting off the ground in Poland called Yellow Emperor (Zollty Cesarz in Polish). It applies to specialist wholefood stores with between 30 and 100 m² of retail space. In May 2003, Agnieszka Oledzka (picture: second from the left side) opened her first shop in the Mokotov district in Warsaw. In 2007, the enterprise really got going, and three more wholefood shops were established under the name of a Chinese emperor from long ago who is said to have conferred great benefits on mankind.

Agnieszka Oledzka is both editor and publisher of the magazine Wegetarianski. The name reveals the contents. With a circulation of 15,000 a month she provides information on vegetarian food, health, environment and esoteric and spiritual topics. She made use of the wide distribution of her magazine in Poland to appeal for more stores to be founded. She put a comprehensive questionnaire on the internet in order to limit the number of applicants and to find those who appeared suitable for her project. She registered an astonishing 130,000 hits on the website in one month. She is thrilled by the response: “In just six months we received around a hundred enquiries from people keen to set up a store.”

This is how she came to open the second Yellow Emperor shop (40 m²) in the centre of Warsaw. The shop is fitted out with a natural look – with solid wood shelving and wooden floor. Every day, 30 to 50 customers come through the door to do their shopping. The store has a good range of all the basic food items and many dietary products. An important line for Agnieszka is baby clothing made from organic cotton that is manufactured by the company Lotties.

Books are the other things she is particularly keen on. In her main store in Mokotov she has about 1000 titles in a 25 m² section of the shop, and in her smaller shop in the town centre books take up about 8 m². She stocks literature covering a whole range of topics: from yoga, psychology, ecology, vegetarian cookery books and nutrition to the greening of towns and, of course, gardening. Agnieszka herself has an orchard measuring 1 ha outside Warsaw that she manages ‘quite extensively’, as she puts it. This year she produced 700 bottles of very tasty apple juice from old varieties of apple like the Pippin – she keeps some for herself and sells the rest in her shops.

The third shop that is also run as a franchise was opened a short time ago in Gdynia near Danzig on the Baltic coast. This specialist shop has 50 m² of retail space. The fourth shop will open in December in the Zoliborz district of Warsaw, again with 50 m². “For us that’s a big shop,” says Agnieszka defensively about the rather small scale of her shops. However, she is playing safe in order to keep the running costs low, and she is aware that it will take time to convince her regular customers of the benefits of vegetarian organic food.

As well as the shops themselves, she has set up a home delivery service. “Customers can order everything via the internet, and we deliver as soon as we can,” she explains. They make between 10 and 20 deliveries a day to customers’ doors within 5 km of the main shop in Ulica Bruna 34 in Mokotov. If the order is for more than 200 Zloty (50 euros), delivery is free.

In the main store, with the little editorial office at the back, seminars (on, for example, effective micro-organisms) and events are held. And you can book cosmetic applications and massage too.

Agnieszka Oledzka and her partner Jerzy Niczporuk would like to establish an import wholesale business to supplement their stock with interesting products from abroad and to make their shops different from others in the business. This move would enable them to supply particular brands exclusively to their own store and to the franchise shops.