AllDay Mart to target growing middle class with a “preference for premium”

The Villar Family’s upcoming grocery store IPO, AllDay Mart [ALLDY 0.80 pre-IPO] said recently that it hopes to capitalize on a shift in Philippine consumer trends away from the value and toward a “preference for premium” for the items that “matter most”.

ALLDY said that it hopes to provide Filipinos with the “global standard of grocery shopping experience”, and that this attention to quality and detail will help differentiate the ALLDY brand from the “local supermarket landscape”.

ALLDY noted this shift toward premium products and experiences during its market research trips in Metro Manila and in the United States.

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This appears to be something like a “Trader Joe’s” strategy of attracting quality-conscious consumers with premium and curated products, with the hopes of converting a large number of those quality-conscious consumers into habitual buyers of its in-house brands and products.

The real money is made selling the in-house stuff where the margins are high enough to cover the costs of selling the low-margin expensive stuff and setting “the mood” with the premium decor. Whether ALLDY can pull this off at scale, though, remains to be seen, but the Villar Family appears to be well-versed in the bait-and-switch game of luring customers in with high-end products, only to aggressively promote cheaper (more profitable) in-house brands for the actual sale.

This strategy has worked well for the family’s Home Depot-inspired AllHome [HOME 9.90 1.98%], and it would certainly be in character for the Family to continue with this strategy for ALLDY which is aimed at the same “new middle-class” demographic.

The quick expansion of stores like Healthy Options suggests that there is a market for premium grocery items in Metro Manila, but whether the thirst for premium products (or premium-adjacent Villar Family in-house products) is strong enough to support double or triple the number of Healthy Options stores while carrying a much larger footprint is kind of the grand open question.

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