Last night I attended a dinner to bid farewell to Jean Noel Perrault who has successfully completed his contract term with the supermarket chain WAY.

The farewell dinner party allowed me to be reminded of the friendship and work association I had with this wonderful gang of hardworking entrepreneurs: the WAY group.

When I was handed over the responsibility of SPAR supermarkets way back in 1997 in my capacity of Cluster Director of Rogers & Co, with my team, we devised some scheme to grow the supermarket business that Rogers owned. Rogers, at the time, owned 3 supermarkets and had to face the competition of the hypermarket Continent, the chain of Winners stores from Ireland Blyth, and the GSR chain of supermarkets. How to grow the business without investing in it?  Operating a Franchised SPAR chain supermarket was the decision taken. The team managed mostly through external growth, in a span of 2 years to create a SPAR chain of 11 supermarkets. Later Rogers cashed in with a hefty profit by selling off the SPAR business to Bourbon group’s Jumbo hypermarkets.

In 2003, the franchised members of SPAR became uncomfortable with the new management of Jumbo. We met and thrashed out a solution. After some work, together we decided to create and build up a new chain under the name WAY. Since its opening in October 2004 WAY has been growing from strength to strength to stand today as a chain of 11 stores will a yearly turnover of 2.2 billion rupees.

WAY is now positioned to grow further with the internal 20 % annual growth experienced in the last year. Possibilities are now opened for external growth too. Should WAY seize the opportunities, further development & growth would occur to become the largest supermarket group of the country. That is the WAY.

How was it possible to  build up the present notoriety of WAY in Mauritius in such a short span with minimum expense?