Hunting for retail innovation in Barcelona

I recently returned from a relatively rare business trip to Barcelona, Spain. Excited to be back in the market after a few years, I persuaded my client to take me on a tour of nearby stores. Predictably, of course Carrefour was on the list of stores we would go to, but so were Eroski’s Spanish subsidiary Caprabo and Spain’s own Mercadona. I was particularly keen to understand whether Spain’s economic woes had provoked any major retail innovations, and here’s what I found:

Discounters don’t have to be ‘cheap’

Think about hard discounters like Aldi and Lidl and immediately images of down-market stores, stocked with no-name brands and slim pickings in fresh foods come to mind. Not so in Mercadona, Spain’s home-grown answer to Germany’s upstarts.  Mercadona is no competitor to Whole Foods BUT a lot of thought has gone into the in-store environment and there is a clear focus on quality (sorry no photos here – I was under strict instructions!). This is most obvious in fresh foods, but interestingly also in home and personal care, where the chain has invested heavily in building own-label products that perform ‘better’ than the branded alternative.