“Vkusville” and Do.bro Coffee will develop coffee shops under the new brand “Vmeste”

Vkusville, together with the Do.bro Coffee chain based in Blagoveshchensk, will develop coffee shops under the new Vmeste brand, which will open not in the retailer’s stores. The company is now actively starting to work in the catering market, launching its Goryacha cafes and Roman pizzerias and buying existing chains, such as Anderson. But Vkusville is entering the coffee shop segment, where competition is already high, quite late, experts warn.

Project Office LLC, owned by the Vkusville chain, became the owner of 80% in the Vmeste company, the remaining 20% ​​went to the co-owner of the Do.bro Coffee chain of coffee shops created in Blagoveshchensk, Yegor Matveev, Kommersant discovered in SPARK. In March 2024, the partners registered the domain 24vmeste.ru.

Vkusville and Do.bro Coffee confirmed to Kommersant that we are talking about a new project to open coffee shops under the Vmeste brand. Do.bro Coffee will test the format “with the support of Vkusville,” the parties say. The companies added that the decision on scaling will be made based on the results of the first points. At the same time, as Vkusville clarified, the coffee shops will not be tied to the chain’s stores.

Recently, Vkusville has begun to actively work in the catering market. Since 2023, the chain has been developing the Goryacha cafe. In November of the same year, the company acquired the Anderson family cafe chain. In the near future, the retailer will launch its own pizzerias under the Romans brand, Vedomosti reported.

Vkusville is developing separate cafes inside its stores, like other large retailers. Thus, Magnit has been opening such points since 2018, now there are more than fifty of them, a representative of the chain said. Lenta opened a self-service restaurant Lenta Fresh in its hypermarket in the summer of 2023, but this establishment is the only one for now.

Azbuka Vkusa has 160 coffee shops in stores, including ten cafes with a separate menu and waiters and one city cafe, said Dmitry Salavatov, head of the retailer’s Cafes and Coffee Shops department. The turnover of coffee shops, according to him, is now about 10% of the total turnover of the chain. The coffee shop format helps increase store traffic, he explains. Perekrestki (part of the X5 Group) has 260 cafes with tables, a representative of the chain said. In the summer of 2023, the company tested summer cafe-verandas in Anapa and Moscow. X5 Group calls this format profitable for the network.

In 2023, the number of coffee shops in cities with a population of over a million, according to the 2GIS service, increased by 10% year-on-year, to 15.4 thousand points. According to Check Index calculations, the number of purchases in coffee shops also increased by 14% year-on-year, with an increase in the average check by 11%, to 634 rubles.

The coffee shop market is now growing, but Vkusville is entering this segment quite late, since it is already saturated, notes Sergei Rumyantsev, founder and co-owner of One Group (a chain of coffee shops One Price Coffee and Coffee In). He considers attracting a partner with expertise to be a logical step, since Vkusville does not yet have successful experience in launching a separate project in public catering.

Irina Bolotova, a partner in the service for organizing retail space “Pro.Stori”, does not rule out that the partners will develop this project as a franchise. But she considers it illogical to open coffee shops under a name that is not associated with the strong Vkusvilla brand. General Director of Infoline-Analytics Mikhail Burmistrov, however, believes that such distancing, on the contrary, reduces risks for the retailer if the project does not justify itself.

Polina Gritsenko