Supermarket franchise Mace expects to grow turnover and scale by 10 per cent this year.

At a conference for franchisees in Kilkenny yesterday, the company said sales were on target to hit €440 million by the end of 2005.

This will be a 10 per cent improvement on the €400 million that it recorded last year.

The size of the business has grown at a similar rate, according to its chairman, Conor Whelan.

He said that, by the end of the year, it will have grown the number outlets to 250 this year from around 220 in 2004.

Fifty of these outlets are on Maxol service station sites. The pair have been in partnership for eight years.

Mr Whelan said that the retail company had invested €25 million in this over that period of time.

He said that the company planned to continue to grow at the same rate over the medium return.

"We hope to increase the overall number of stores to 300 by the end of 2007," he said. "That's 25 new stores a year."

He added that, at any time, the company has its next 15 stores in the pipeline.

However, Mr Whelan claimed at the conference that investment by independent retail chains would slow if the ban on selling groceries below their wholesale price was dropped.

The Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Micheál Martin, has signalled that he will change the Groceries Order, a central part which is the ban, this autumn.

Mr Whelan argued yesterday that it protected independent operators against "predatory pricing" by the big multiples.

He rejected the argument that the Competition Act, which bans this practice, provided adequate protection. "I'm not sure that that would be an effective tool in policing the market," he said.