Grocery giant Coles has unveiled a new upmarket supermarket offering, featuring an in-store food court, on-demand vegetable chopping and a swathe of sustainability initiatives as the retailer said it aims to cut its carbon emissions 75 per cent by 2030, stepping up its targets.

Located in the Melbourne suburb of Moonee Ponds, the site is Coles’ second premium ‘grocerant’ supermarket-restaurant hybrid, the first of which launched last year in Tooronga. Presenting the new store, the $20 billion retailer pledged to fuel all of its 800-plus sites across the country with renewable energy by 2025 and slice emissions by three-quarters by 2030, a move lauded by advocacy groups Greenpeace and the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility.

Coles is following rivals Woolworths and Coles in upgrading its emissions targets, having faced pressure from advocacy groups at its last annual general meeting, where it was urged to increase its uptake of renewable energy and set firmer emissions targets. The retailer had previously only had emissions targets set up until 2020.

The company has been trialling a number of different store formats to suit different demographics and locations, including smaller-format, customised Coles ‘Local’ stores and the larger-format grocerant locations. Chief executive Steven Cain described the new ‘grocerant’ concept was the retailer’s top-shelf store format.

“We’ve got our A, B and C store formats, and this is one of our A-plus stores,” Mr Cain said on Friday.

The Moonee Ponds store includes an on-site Roll’d Vietnamese store, stone-cooked pizza, a coffee bar, a fishmonger and on-demand fruit and vegetable chopping and juicing. Mr Cain said the company could look to roll out upwards of 10 of the new hybrid sites in suitable locations across the country.

“To support the additional team members in-store you need volume, so you probably wouldn’t do this sort of thing in a low-volume store,” he said. “Moonee Ponds does well in excess of $1 million in sales a week, so at those sort of transaction rates you can afford to have more service in-store.”

Coles shares were down 0.2 per cent against broader market losses of 0.3 per cent, sitting at $15.55 at 1:30pm.

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