KEY HIGHLIGHTS
- Prepared food is fully built out, with a bake! in-store bakery, a hot counter at IDR 7,000-11,500 and ready meals at IDR 20,000-22,000, a lever our model does not explicitly carry. Freshly baked bread and hot chicken are converted in-store and carry no national branded price reference, so pricing is discretionary rather than a negotiated trade-terms outcome. At 3% of group sales on a 55% category margin, prepared food would lift blended gross margin by roughly 99bp, against the 110bp of expansion we forecast across the five years to FY30F.
- Alfagift enrolment is gated behind queue avoidance rather than signage, with an Area Self Service checkout restricted to customers holding the app or an e-wallet, alongside a dedicated Pick Up Area committed to order collection. The ask lands at the moment the customer most wants the benefit, converting anonymous cash baskets into identified ones. No transaction was observed at the station during our visit.
- A full-scale planogram laboratory sits inside the head office, a simulated Alfamidi at production specification with a Beauty Zone fixture, Produk UMKM shelf and live Buy 1 Get 1 tickets. Minimarket gross margin is substantially a function of what suppliers pay for shelf position and how much shelf own-brand occupies, and a retailer that designs and validates layouts centrally can negotiate trade terms against a shelf position it can actually enforce.
- Midi Fresh and Lawson sit two rungs above the minimarket, with a produce-led entrance, bakery tier, chilled wall and a Rumah Es Krim counter at IDR 5,000-10,000, addressing a fresh mission the sub-400 sqm format cannot serve; fresh contributed 15.1% of MIDI’s 1H26 revenue mix. The adjacent Lawson Station is ready-to-eat led, with oden, udon, onigiri and MontBlue coffee at IDR 18,000, but runs MyLawson as a loyalty ecosystem separate from Alfagift.
- What we could not establish, fixture rollout across the estate, category gross margin, waste and sell-through, and incremental capex per store. The hot case was lightly stocked at five to six pieces and no self-service transaction was observed, both single observations on a first visit with no prior-period baseline. Key watch: whether blended gross margin outruns our forecast path while private label penetration and disclosed trade terms hold broadly steady, which would tell us prepared food is doing the work.
Regards, Aldiracita Research
