You Think Franchising a Restaurant Is Hard? Try a Supermarket

By Sean Goldsmith

BinDawood’s Qatar move tests whether Saudi retail know-how can travel as easily as the brand.

BinDawood has started franchising its Saudi supermarket brand in Qatar. The sign above the door is the easy part; the real test is whether years of retail knowledge can cross the border with it.

By Sean Goldsmith

There is a reason so much international franchising happens in restaurants. They are difficult businesses to run, but at least everyone understands what has to be repeated. The burger should taste the same, the kitchen should work properly and the customer should recognise the brand when they walk through the door. A supermarket takes that challenge and multiplies it across thousands of products.

That is what makes BinDawood Holding's move into Qatar interesting. The Saudi retailer opened its first franchised BinDawood supermarket in the country in February, the first step in an agreement with The Regional Group to develop eight stores.

BinDawood is not testing an unproven retail concept. Its parent company generated SAR6.35 billion in revenue in 2025 and operates a grocery business with more than 140,000 stock-keeping units across the group. The difficult part is taking all the knowledge behind that scale and making it work in another country.

Franchising a business like this involves far more than transferring a name, store design and operations manual. Behind every supermarket shelf is a decision about what to buy, how much to buy, what customers will pay and how quickly it needs to sell. Get enough of those decisions wrong and a very busy supermarket can still be a poor business.

A Saudi supermarket cannot simply be copied into Qatar

Saudi Arabia and Qatar are close neighbours, with plenty of similarities in the way people live and shop. That should help BinDawood, but it would be a mistake to assume that proximity makes the retail job simple.

Supermarkets are built around thousands of small customer preferences. Shoppers care about price, but they also care about which rice is available, the imported brands they recognise, the cuts of meat they prefer, the promotions that make them buy more and whether the fresh food looks good when they arrive in the evening.

The Regional Group therefore has a much bigger job than finding eight suitable buildings and putting BinDawood signs above the doors. A strong local partner should understand Qatari customers, property, regulation and suppliers in ways a management team in Saudi Arabia cannot reasonably be expected to understand them.

BinDawood brings decades of grocery experience, buying knowledge and operating systems. The Regional Group brings the local knowledge required to make those things useful in Qatar. The difficult moments will come when those two sets of experience point in different directions.

That tension exists in almost every international franchise. In a restaurant, it might involve changing several menu items or adjusting pricing. In a supermarket, the same argument can be repeated across aisle after aisle. The answer cannot always be that something should remain unchanged because that is how it works in Saudi Arabia; if it were, there would be little point in choosing a serious Qatari partner.

The real franchise is behind the shelves

Customers walking into the new store will see BinDawood branding, familiar departments and thousands of products. The more valuable part of the franchise relationship may be everything they cannot see.

The Regional Group needs access to buying knowledge, category management, inventory controls, technology, supplier relationships and a clear understanding of how BinDawood makes money from the space inside a supermarket. Fresh food has to arrive frequently enough to look good and sell before it becomes waste. Imported products need enough margin to cover their costs without becoming uncompetitive, while promotions need sufficient stock behind them to avoid disappointing customers.

Poor decisions become expensive very quickly. Too much stock traps cash on the shelf, while too little sends customers elsewhere. A product that sells brilliantly in Jeddah may take up valuable space in Doha without moving quickly enough to justify being there.

This is where supermarket franchising becomes a serious test of what the franchisor is actually transferring. Putting BinDawood above the entrance is straightforward compared with reproducing the decisions that helped build a SAR6.35 billion retail group.

The local partner should be buying years of knowledge it does not need to develop from scratch, including mistakes BinDawood has already made and systems built to prevent them happening again. If most of that has to be reinvented once the stores arrive in Qatar, it becomes reasonable to ask what the franchise relationship is really providing.

Grocery gives you very little room to hide

Supermarkets can put enormous amounts of money through the tills while leaving considerably less behind once the bills are paid. That makes the details of the operation unusually important.

Inventory is particularly unforgiving. Buy too much and working capital sits on shelves or ends up as waste. Buy too little and customers cannot find what they came for. Get fresh-food demand wrong and the loss can be sitting in a bin by the end of the day. Price badly and shoppers notice because many of them have a good idea what the same basket costs somewhere else.

The eight-store commitment makes the Qatar deal more interesting because this is not one flagship designed to test whether customers recognise the name. BinDawood and The Regional Group are planning a meaningful local network.

If the first stores work, scale should help. Greater purchasing volume can improve supplier negotiations, marketing costs can be spread across more locations and local management becomes more efficient. The same scale works against you when the original assumptions are wrong, because an error built into one store can become considerably more expensive when it is repeated across eight.

Franchising also makes the expansion more capital-efficient for BinDawood because the Saudi company does not have to fund and operate the entire Qatari network itself. That does not make supermarkets any cheaper to build. Much of the capital requirement, inventory risk and day-to-day operating responsibility has simply moved to the franchise partner.

This isn't the franchisee most people picture

The Regional Group is also a useful reminder that the word “franchisee” now covers businesses that have almost nothing in common.

At one end of franchising is the individual who leaves employment, invests their savings and buys their first business. At the other is a company taking responsibility for eight supermarkets in another country, with the capital, management, property expertise and supplier relationships required to support them.

Both are franchisees, but the job is completely different.

A corporate partner of this size should not simply be waiting for instructions from the franchisor. Part of its value is that it knows things BinDawood does not know about Qatar. That makes the relationship more balanced and potentially more difficult, because a capable local partner needs enough freedom to use the expertise it was selected for.

There is a useful lesson here for Middle Eastern brands looking across the GCC. Regional expansion can appear deceptively straightforward on a map because the flights are short, economies are connected and consumers may already recognise brands from neighbouring countries. That familiarity does not turn the Gulf into one large consumer market with six different flags.

The right local franchisee should therefore bring considerably more than a cheque. In a business as complicated as grocery retail, local judgement is part of what the franchisor is buying too.

The Qatar customer gets the final vote

BinDawood has plenty working in its favour. It is an established Saudi retailer with significant scale, and Qatar is a logical market in which to test a wider regional franchise strategy. The company has also made clear that the Qatar opening forms part of its ambitions for further GCC expansion.

The next stage is much less glamorous than signing agreements and cutting ribbons. The Qatari operation needs to get the shelves right, which means the useful numbers will be sales per square metre, basket size, stock availability, gross margin, inventory turns, fresh-food waste and repeat visits.

Those figures will tell BinDawood and The Regional Group whether they have transferred a functioning retail business rather than simply a recognisable brand. The performance of the later stores will be even more revealing because it will show whether the economics improve as the Qatari network gains scale.

This is also why the deal deserves attention beyond grocery. Franchising is sometimes discussed as though putting a business into a franchise structure somehow makes it easier to reproduce. It does not. The agreement provides a way for another operator to reproduce the business, but the underlying complexity remains exactly where it was.

The more complicated the business, the more knowledge the franchisor needs to transfer and the more capable the franchisee has to be. BinDawood has already demonstrated that it can build a major supermarket business in Saudi Arabia. Qatar will provide a different test: whether the knowledge behind that success can travel without ignoring the local judgement required to make it work.

What We Can Learn From This

Middle Eastern brands looking across the GCC should resist treating neighbouring countries as simple extensions of their home market. A strong local franchise partner should contribute more than capital, particularly in sectors such as grocery where assortment, sourcing, inventory and pricing can change the economics quickly. BinDawood's eight-store Qatar rollout should provide a meaningful test of how much Saudi retail knowledge can be transferred and where Qatari experience needs to take precedence. If the model succeeds, it could make franchising a more interesting expansion route for complex Gulf retail businesses that have traditionally relied on their own capital.

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