Michel Olmi is a reserved businessman, like a good mathematician, but with visible success in every corner of Colombia. A little over a decade ago, at a time when the retail market was completely saturated in Colombia, Michel saw the opportunity to revolutionize the market with a clear purpose: to have the most efficient value chain in the country to transfer that profit to the Colombians in much cheaper food products. Thus D1 was born.

Many people had already dabbled in this mission of increasing access to cheap food. Politicians with food subsidy programs; lawyers, invoking the right to food, and even Compensation Funds, with resources guaranteed by the State for workers' wages, and they messed with non-profit supermarkets. None of these strategies proved to be sustainable or desirable for the vast majority of the population.

In 2009, however, the first D1 store arrived in Medellín. The bet was clear: the business model is going to reduce the number of times it makes a profit in the chain, it is going to negotiate en masse and it is going to use innovation to reduce waiting times. The effect Michelle Olmi was born in Colombia.

A friend tells me that in Quibdó the story was particularly important. In an area where informal work and low wages abound, a saving of 40% or 50% in food and hygiene products greatly improves people's lives: that means having better food, accessing better services or being able to support relatives.

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— Aysha Forever Tue Jul 06 12:41:35 +0000 2021

The Olmi effect not only benefits the people of the municipality, but also those around it. On any given Saturday, buses can be seen arriving at D1 of Quibdó in the Tutunendo corregimiento so that dozens of peasants can take advantage of the low prices of the supermarket. As Roberto Angulo (or Amartya Sen, to go a little further) would say, inclusion in the markets is the basis of development. And the wide proliferation of the D1 yes that has achieved it.

The good thing is that these stories are not just simple insights into remote territories cut off from the rest of the world. In fact, Jean-Marc François, one of the most respected international references in the industry, pointed out in 2019 that D1 and Justo & Well, the two companies founded by Michelle Olmi are the biggest retail brands of the last decade. A couple of years later, with a magnificent story in between, Jean-Marc became the CEO of Justo & Well.

Fair & Well, it is today who leads the banners of the Olmi effect in Colombia. They started recently, but they are already the fastest growing hard discount store chain on the continent, they are democratizing the consumption of quality products at low prices and including more and more people in the markets and in the prosperity that free enterprise brings .

From the most remote places, the most forgotten corners, the most difficult neighborhoods. From the Amazon to La Guajira, from the economic boom to the pandemic, the business community around hard discount stores has brought prosperity to all the customers, suppliers and governments that surround it.