Energy Assembly UK: Retailers tackle foodservice, energy and a missing government strategy
From innovative food programs to Westminster's missing fuel strategy, UK forecourt leaders gathered on the Algarve coast for the first edition of Energy Assembly UK.
Energy Assembly held its inaugural edition this month, bringing the UK's leading fuel retail groups together with forecourt and convenience suppliers for two days of curated meetings and conference sessions at the Grande Real Santa Eulália on the Algarve coast. Event chair Michael O'Loughlin opened by framing the event's ambition to grow, noting the range of pressures facing UK forecourts makes gatherings like this one increasingly necessary.
Henry Armour, Chairman Emeritus and CEO International of NACS, set the tone early, arguing that the trends reshaping forecourt foodservice are strikingly consistent worldwide: convenience retail is leaning on food and drink to offset declining cigarette and fuel margins, even as coffee itself becomes a harder category to win. Cold drinks now make up roughly 70% of Starbucks sales, he noted, a shift he tied to more consumers brewing coffee at home.
The session was followed by a panel with Ian Cawley of Park Garage Group, Tom Highland of Highland Group and Sajeev Gowrinathan of Shinon Group, built on that theme. Retailers described differentiating through local sourcing, from bakery bread to independent butchers, rather than competing head-on with national chains, and pointed to a growing, more health-conscious customer base as reason to expand beyond basic coffee and sandwiches.
"We got some really resilient, robust answers from these guys. As ever, the forecourt sector is resilient. It thinks outside the box, they're looking at what the opportunity is, and they'll rise to the opportunity," said O'Loughlin.
A separate session with David Charman, Director at Parkfoot, and Ramsay MacDonald, Non-Executive Director at Highway Stops Retail, turned to on-site energy generation. Charman recounted drilling a water well on his own site decades ago that now supplies the equivalent of roughly £18,000 a year in car wash water, while both retailers described solar installations paying back within four years. On EV charging, the pair were cautious: chargers work best where a site has room for a meaningful bank of units rather than one or two, and both said they had moved away from leasing to third-party charge point operators after poor visibility into performance data. Drive-off and "no means of payment" losses also came up as a persistent drain, estimated at around £20,000 a year for the average forecourt.
The closing panel, with Dave Penny of Penny on the Move, Darren Briggs of Ascona, Joseph Richardson of Jos Richardson & Son, Zain Hyde of Lavazza, Sarah Freeman of HH Business Finance and Karanbir Landa of DSL, looked further out, weighing site consolidation, succession planning and financing against a UK vehicle parc still growing even as the number of service stations has fallen from around 38,000 in 1970 to roughly 8,000 today.
Beyond the main-stage sessions, one-on-one meetings remained central to the event, giving retailers direct access to suppliers spanning the full breadth of the forecourt business, from fuel pricing and servicing technology to coffee equipment and bottle return dispensers. The format let retailers work through practical, day-to-day supplier relationships alongside the bigger strategic conversations happening on stage.
