CJ Lang opens new company store with SPAR Market format

CJ Lang & Son has opened its first company store since 2017 with the first SPAR Market format in Scotland.

CJ Lang acquired a third-generation family-run convenience store, Kinnaird’s Nisa Local, in Dalbeattie, Dumfries & Galloway, and transformed it with the SPAR Market format.

The SPAR Dalbeattie store now has a very strong focus on fresh fruit and vegetables and chilled foods, and caters for key customer missions including ‘making a meal’ and ‘grab and eat’.

The store has a large deli counter and features an extensive range of fresh produce and food from many local suppliers. These include Irving’s Bakery, Mitchells of Castle Douglas, Irthingvale Wholesale, Lockerbie Cheddars, and Galloway Preserves.

For customers looking for food on the go, SPAR Scotland’s ‘CJ’s’ Food to Go counter offers hot breakfast rolls throughout the morning and extends its offering into the evening with a selection of hot food. This is complemented by a wide range of bakery products, morning goods and cakes from Scottish baker Browning’s. A self-serve Costa Express coffee machine, Tango Ice Blast and frozen Calippo slush machine offer immediate refreshment for customers on the go and will be installed in the coming weeks.

SPAR Dalbeattie prides itself on being a real community store, with all the staff members living locally to the shop.

Store manager Marie McMinn and her team invited the community to an in-store launch event on 22 April. Customers took the opportunity to pick up free goody bags, spin the wheel to win prizes, and sample some treats. The event also saw two local organisations, Alma Mcfayden Care Home and Dalbeattie Playgroup, receive donations of £1,000 each from SPAR Scotland.

CJ Lang company-owned stores operations director Brian Straiton commented: “We are very excited to be back in the property market to acquire new convenience stores as part of our business strategy of adding an additional three to four stores per year to our company-owned estate.

“SPAR Market is an exciting new fresh, chilled and produce store format for CJ Lang and SPAR Scotland that will really help to differentiate and grow from our traditional SPAR customer offer.

“As a genuinely Scottish family business we share many similar values with the Kinnaird family. We want to maintain all the great work that they have done, and build upon these, whilst adding additional SPAR Scotland products and services to the store.”

A home shopping delivery service will continue, and that will be complemented with the introduction of the Snappy Shopper app.