our franchisees and what are your thoughts on it? CC: “Obviously from a small business perspective, it’s a fantastic outcome and as a franchise business, it’s great for our franchisees to get that bit of breathing room in the future because they’ve had a pretty tough run for the last few years. Wages and rents in shopping centres have increased, so it feels like they’ve finally had a win. A lot of our franchisees who work on Sundays will now be able to say, ‘I’ll not need to work on Sunday anymore and let one of my senior staff run the store instead. I’ll actually spend the day with my family and I’ll work an extra day during the week, so I can work Tuesday to Saturday or Monday to Friday’. It’s a win-win, so the franchisees spends time with their family, and a staff member gets to work 150 per cent rates on a Sunday which they may not have been able to do previously. It’s a win-win for both the retailers and the staff.” IRW: Your sales were particularly good over Christmas. What do you chalk that up to? CC: “That was very much off the back of our turkey and festive products having fantastic sales. That was driven by a strong marketing campaign, where Lenard’s was back on TV for the first time in a long time. We had a national TV ad campaign that ran across the country and strong involvement with Better Homes & Gardens, where we sponsored a Christmas segment on the show and were featured in their magazine and website as well. On top of that, we had huge digital marketing activity, which helped drive our online orders. You’ll be amazed at the number of people who order turkey in November – they’re are a lot more organised than you and I might be, but it’s amazing how early people are planning and preparing their food for Christmas. They’re ordering it to pick it up on the 22nd 23rd or 24th of December, but they’re ordering it six to eight weeks out, just to make sure it’s locked in and it’s one less thing to worry about. We’ve had an online ordering system for a number of years but the improvements in 2016 were significantly better. We made it simple and straightforward for customers to pick the kind of turkey and flavour they wanted, the store they wanted to pick it up from and lock it in. It was all about making it easy for the customer.” IRW: Tell us about the rollout of the refurbished stores. Why did Lenard’s Chicken decide to launch a new look? CC: “Right at the end of 2015, we launched a new store look. Bondi Junction is an example of our stores with a new look and feel, which launched in June last year. We opened 15 new stores across 2016 with the new look, too. It’s all about providing a more contemporary, exciting, modern version of Lenard’s, rather than the old version, where your mum and my mum might have shopped. It’s about having something that’s contemporary where someone in their late 20s might buy chicken. It’s about getting people to stop and recognise the brand again. Lenard’s has always been the best at chicken, but the stores were looking old and tired – now they look new again. You have to always make sure your brand is relevant for the customer. The stores look completely different now. The old Lenard’s stores were sterile, whereas now we have a warm, inviting look and feel. The cabinets are more modern than the old rounded glass, we have a brighter lighting and importantly, we have a new hot section in our stores.” IRW: What was the thinking behind the launch of the hot section? CC: “The product range has always been fantastic and the pricing, ingredients and flavours have always been great, but this was about making the brand relevant and contemporary – the new store design and adding the hot category have been part of doing that. People can eat our hot chicken products right now if they want – they don’t have to take something home and cook it. We do hot buffalo wings, hot southern-style wings, pulled pollo burgers and wraps and we have a range of salads as well. It’s a place where you might buy a wrap, salad and a drink and sit down in-store. We have a couple of stores with the hot chicken range and there are five or six that we’re looking at opening this year in Sydney and Melbourne. We also have a new premium hot chicken brand called Love Pollo that I actually founded two years ago, just before I joined Lenard’s. It’s a free-range gluten-free rotisserie-roasted business with a whole range of roast chicken flavours. The last thing we want is to be the brand that our parents once shopped at. We want to be a brand that’s relevant to today’s consumer. Having product you can take home and cook is not going to make us that relevant. They want to eat it now, or take it home and bang it straight it in the oven to heat up. They don’t always want to cook a salad with it. A lot of our products are oven-ready – you can take them home, turn on the oven, put them in and you have a full meal sorted. A lot of products are moving to being more service-oriented for the consumer. All our products in the hot format stores are all chicken products – chicken pies, sausage rolls, enchiladas, roast chicken. The way we set it up was to keep it as simple as possible, so the only hot products that our stores are offering are the same as the ones we already sell. We picked a range of those existing products, put them in the oven and put them in a computer-generated program cycle so it was consistent across Australia. The ovens run a computer program that cook the products to perfection, then are displayed in our hot cabinet. It’s as simple as possible for our franchisees.” IRW: What have you learnt since launching the hot products? CC: “We’ve learnt that we’re very new at this and we’ve still got plenty of scope for improvement, but we’ve learnt our products are very popular if customers can buy them right now – they’re happy to buy our famous chicken minis strudels, eat them right now. Our franchisee at Bondi Junction sells a lot of strudels and hot enchiladas, which are some of our most popular products. He cooks hundreds of them a day. They just walk out the door. We know our products are popular with the market and now that we’re delivering them ready to eat, it’s achieving what we want and making the brand more relevant, but it takes time to build awareness that we’ve actually got products.” IRW: What is Lenard’s focusing on this year? CC: “The most exciting plans for 2017 are we have a number of refurbished stores and new ones to open. We also just acquired a large number of stores from another brand, which will be completely converted and changed into a whole new Lenard’s concept. We’ll open 15-20 stores this year, which will all be the new concept.” IRW: Chicken seems to be growing in popularity in the quick service restaurant category, isn’t it? CC: “The growth in chicken has been phenomenal over the last five to 10 years and is not showing any signs of slowing down ­– it’s actually speeding up. That’s probably more of a result of the fact that it’s a relatively healthy product – it’s reasonably priced, it can be paired with any number of ingredients to give great flavours. I keep saying chicken is the new black. It’s something that’s really skyrocketing in terms of consumption. The big difference for us is that we’re a specialty value-add retailer of chicken. We could have 150 pure different chicken products in our cold cabinet every single day for customers to buy. We’re very different in that we’re innovative around the flavours and ingredients that we pair with chicken. We’re more famous for pairing great ingredients with our chicken to create products you can’t get anywhere else. If you want a product that’s crumbed, we have a ciabatta crumb, rather than the normal bread crumb. We do ten different flavours of sausages, like pine nut and spinach sausage. You can’t get a chicken chorizo sausage or a chicken kiev sausage anywhere else. It’s the same for some of our more recent products, like bacon and sweetcorn mini strudels.”  IRW: Having said that, a lot of consumers are still worried about where the food comes from, particularly meat, and they’re looking to organic food, too. CC: “We buy our chicken from Inghams. We make sure the chicken we buy is ethically sourced and processed and meets all the legislative requirements and health standards in Australia. Inghams is publicly listed, so we’ve partnered with them for a number of years now, that in itself gives consumers a lot of comfort.” IRW: A lot of shopping centres are re-thinking their tenancy mix and considering boosting the number of their  food retailers. What are your thoughts on that? CC: “If we continue to see a decline of fashion and other retailers in Australia, then their tenure in shopping centres is going to be harder, and as that happens, foot traffic will go down and that could impact the other retailers in other centres. We have to be careful we’re going into centres that have the right tenant mix. We want to be in locations where people are going to look for great food. If they’re going there for great food, they’ll appreciate what we offer. We have to make sure we’re partnering with the right centres that have great fresh food precincts. They’re investing the money to make sure it’s a great area for customers to come along to and purchase for fresh food. If that means making sure we have a Bakers Delight near our store, we have a good fruit and veg operator, a good butcher – those are all the things that add the value to a centre and that we look for.”