MyConvenience & MySupermarket: Malta’s beloved corner shop gets a 2024 makeover

The Convenience Shop rebrands as MyConvenience and MySupermarket – a very Maltese evolution

Sliema’s Tower Road woke up yesterday to a splash of neon green where the familiar red-and-white “The Convenience Shop” sign had stood for 17 years. By the time the 7 a.m. church bells rang, staff were already peeling off old vinyl and handing out ħobż biż-żejt samples labelled “Minn MyConvenience, bi ħobbietna”. The rebrand to MyConvenience (for the smaller neighbourhood outlets) and MySupermarket (for the larger food halls) is more than a coat of paint; it is a statement about how Maltese retail is sprinting to keep up with a population that now expects Sicilian arancini at 2 a.m. and Qormi-fresh ftira delivered to Gozo before the 4 p.m. Gozo Channel queue.

Local context: from kiosk to click-and-collect
Older villagers still call the chain “il-kiosk ta’ Cardona”, recalling the 2006 original that replaced a dusty lottery outlet in Birkirkara. Back then, Maltese convenience meant a warm Kinnie and a packet of Twistees behind perspex. Today, 60 % of 25- to 40-year-olds living in Malta have at least one grocery app on their phone, NSS data show. The Convenience Shop’s owners – the Cardona siblings, third-generation grocers – watched foreign franchises land at Tigné Point and said, “Ejja, we can do this our way.” The rebrand is their answer to Amazon-owned Whole Foods and the Turkish Macro cash-and-carry that opened in Marsa last year.

Cultural significance: keeping it Maltese
Walk into the newly christened MySupermarket in Fgura and you’ll still find a shrine to the village saint (this week, Santa Marija) wedged between the self-checkout and the kombucha fridge. “We refused to go full Scandinavian minimal,” laughs CEO Rebecca Cardona, 34, who studied retail design in Milan but insists every outlet must stock imqaret from her nanna’s recipe. The colour palette – limestone beige, fishing-boat blue and festa-firework green – was crowdsourced on the Facebook group “Malta Past & Present”, where 4,200 over-60s voted against “another soulless LED box”. The result feels like a village store that swallowed an iPad.

Community impact: jobs, prices and the 3 a.m. conversation
The chain employs 412 people, 78 % of them women working split shifts that fit school runs. Rebranding comes with a €7 million refit, 80 new jobs and, crucially, a price-freeze on 300 “core Maltese staples” – from Gozo cheeselets to St. Helen’s gluten-free bread – until the end of 2025. In a country where grocery inflation hit 9.4 % last winter, that pledge is already political. Economy Minister Silvio Schembri posed for photos holding a frozen rabbit, promising “continued dialogue”. Meanwhile, the PN warned that “small village grocers will be squeezed further”. But in Qrendi, 68-year-old Ġanni who runs a counter-store across the street is pragmatic: “They open 24 hours, I close at noon for siesta. Different customer. We share the same supplier, so I actually get better prices now.”

Tech meets tradition: the dark store in Paola
Behind the baroque façade of a former bakery in Paola, MyConvenience has built Malta’s first “dark store” – a mini-warehouse where pickers on e-bikes assemble orders in seven minutes. Deliveries reach Valletta faster than a taxi at 3 a.m., a lifeline for shift nurses at Mater Dei and iGaming staff on Eastern European time zones. The software was built by Maltese start-up FleetCow, proof that the island can export code while importing pesto.

Conclusion: what’s in a name?
Rebrands can feel cosmetic, but on an island where the corner shop doubled as noticeboard, post-office and gossip hub, names matter. By choosing “MyConvenience” and “MySupermarket”, the Cardonas are inviting islanders to repossess a space multinational chains have long tried to standardise. If they succeed, tomorrow’s Maltese children will remember the smell of fresh qassatat mixed with the beep of a contactless reader – a sensory blend as hybrid, and as stubbornly alive, as Malta itself. The festa season kicks off next week; expect the new green signage to sparkle under the petards, another quiet reminder that even in the age of algorithms, the village still gets the final say.