Kaufland: German supermarket kicks off Brisbane recruitment campaign

A GERMAN supermarket giant is scouring southeast Queensland for possible sites and advertising for new positions across Australia as its plans to challenge the likes of Coles, Woolworths and Costco gain momentum.

• German supermarket Kaufland eyes southeast Queensland

GERMAN supermarket giant Kaufland is scouring southeast Queensland for possible sites as it kicks off a recruiting campaign to man its hyper stores.

The Schwarz Group, which owns Kaufland, recently snapped up a former Bunnings site in Dandenong, Melbourne for $16.4 million and last year paid $25 million for a key 3.6ha Adelaide property.

The company prefers to fly under the radar before making announcements but one industry source in Brisbane said “they are definitely looking around”.

The company has started poaching senior executives from Australian retailers and recruited

a former Metcash and Woolworths executive, Mark Hewlett, as chief operating officer.

Kaufland has already bought a site in Melbourne and is “definitely” looking around Queensland for more Australian options, a source says.

Kaufland has 11 positions across Australia available on job search website SEEK, including a future leader program where the recruit from Brisbane will complete a nine-month training program in Germany.

Kaufland is a hypermarket-style business, which is a combination of a large supermarket and a large discount department store much like Kmart.

Kaufland Australia has received more than $88 million from its German parent company, and its website says it has “an ambitious Australian investment and development program”.

Typically their hypermarkets found overseas can be as large as 20,000sq m, which is five times larger that a typical Coles and Woolworths supermarkets in Australia.

According to the Kaufland website they require a minimum plot size of 15,000sq m and a preferred size of 20,000sq m to 25,000sq m with room for about 400 car parks.

Brisbane retail property specialist Mark Greer said Kaufland will tailor their offering to the Australian market which may mean smaller store sizes.

“But they will still need a big footprint, with access to a large catchment with the right demographic and near arterial roads to allow for regional access,” he said.

“Likely areas would be the high growth areas like the Brisbane-Gold Coast corridor, Brisbane-North Coast corridor and Brisbane-Ipswich western corridor.

“There also might be a couple of opportunities in the Brisbane and possibly former Masters sites but they would be pretty rare.”

In Europe Kaufland stores carry about 60,000 branded and private label products, more than double the range in Coles and Woolworths, mainly fresh food and packaged groceries but also clothing and footwear, electronics, homewares, sporting goods, stationery, garden products and hardware.

Depending on the scale of Kaufland’s expansion, they put pressure on Coles, Woolworths and Metcash’s IGA retailers, which have been affected by Aldi’s rapid growth since 2001.

A Kaufland spokesman declined to comment on the speculation.

Originally published as Kaufland: German supermarket kicks off Brisbane recruitment campaign