The Convenience Store That Sells You Time

In this episode of Marketing Factories, a podcast by Effie Europe and REBORRN, Dafni Prosalika (Partner at REBORRN) welcomes Jarosław Serednicki, Marketing & Digital Director at Żabka Polska, recorded at Żabka's new office in central Warsaw.

In a single generation, Żabka has gone from a small Polish convenience chain founded in 1998 to one of Europe's largest convenience networks, now past 13,000 stores and opening roughly three new ones every day, with a foothold in Romania too. Jarek, who has spent almost ten years with the company, walks through the machine behind that growth: a model built on independent franchisees, a marketing function that sits inside the commercial department, and a shift in thinking from selling products to selling people back their time.

That shift, from the long-running "Little Big Store" positioning to freeing up your free time, opened a much bigger horizon. Żabka added services, gastronomy and quality food, built a super app with 11.3 million users, and turned an enormous stream of data (almost 500,000 customer opinions a month and 4.3 million transactions a day) into sharper decisions and, increasingly, a media business of its own through Żabka Ads. As Jarek puts it, this is not cookie-based advertising, this is real behaviour.

The conversation ranges across how the agency model evolved, why every single Żabka is run by a franchisee, where AI already earns its place, and what creative effectiveness really means to someone who sits on the Effie Europe jury: to be effective, not only impressive. As ever, the episode closes with the 58:hours challenge: the one problem Jarek would hand the world's best minds.