Co-op has closed the five standalone On The Go shops it opened from July 2025, just over a year after the small food-to-go format made its debut in Solihull. The group is keeping the concept, but only inside its existing convenience stores, where it says the offer performs best.
The five shops traded in Solihull, Altrincham, Aylesbury, Kingston upon Thames and Chelmsford. Each covered between 550 and 850 sq ft and was built around breakfast, lunch and evening food to go, from breakfast meal boxes to a deli counter and pizzas cooked to order.
The closures were reported on 24 September 2026 by The Grocer, Restaurant Online and Asian Trader. According to Asian Trader, Chelmsford shut in early August 2026 and Altrincham at the end of that month.
A format that stopped at five sites
When the Solihull shop opened on 31 July 2025, Co-op’s plan was far larger than the estate it ended up with. Restaurant Online reports that the group intended to have 15 variations of the concept trading by the end of 2025 and several hundred by 2028. The rollout stopped at five standalone units, a pilot ending well short of the network scale most of the food and drink franchises recruiting in the UK are built towards.
In December 2025, Co-op also fitted the On The Go range into five of its existing convenience stores in Yorkshire and London. Those five stores stay open, and they are now the only form the concept takes.
Food to go moves back inside the convenience estate
Co-op gives the performance of the in-store version as the reason for the change. A Co-op spokesperson said the concept “works at its best” when it sits inside an existing store alongside the wider grocery range, and described food to go as “central to our convenience strategy”. The shift moves the effort from opening new micro-sites to using an estate that Co-op put at around 2,400 food stores in July 2024. Co-op has not said whether the integrated version will be added to more stores, or how many.
Good to know
“Co-op” covers several separate businesses. Co-op Group runs its own franchise programme and became an associate member of the British Franchise Association in March 2021, a voluntary trade body rather than a regulator, as what a franchise is explains.
The independent societies, such as Central Co-op and Midcounties, are co-operatives in their own right, and Co-op Wholesale, formerly Nisa, is a supply business. None of the reports on the closures links the On The Go format to the franchise programme.
Franchising is still where Co-op is adding sites
The closures leave Co-op’s franchise expansion on its original course. According to KamCity, Co-op had 65 franchise stores at the end of 2025 and was aiming for more than 100 franchise sites during 2026, on university campuses, in hospitals and on petrol forecourts, settings where the partner normally already controls the site, a route into franchising covered in being the right candidate to open a franchise.
That programme goes back to a July 2024 agreement with EG On The Move, which began with seven trial franchise stores. At the time, Co-op set a target of more than 500 franchise stores by 2030, a third of them on forecourts.
The On The Go closures come in the same week as Co-op Group’s first-half results, which showed a wider underlying loss. None of the reports gives a cost for the closures or says what happens next to the five units. The next point to watch is how far the integrated format spreads through Co-op’s own estate and its franchised stores.
