Residents of Dakhla will soon have their first Marjane hypermarket, as the Moroccan retail group expands into the country’s far south. The new store, on Rue Al Oualae, is due to open on 31 October 2026. It will bring Marjane’s total number of hypermarkets across Morocco to 45.
The opening is part of a wider expansion beyond the country’s main cities. Marjane opened its 42nd hypermarket in Laâyoune in March 2024, its 43rd in Kénitra in October 2025 and its 44th in Ouarzazate in February 2026.
In Laâyoune, the company also opened the Mazeej Mall retail park in February 2025.
The move into Dakhla comes as the city attracts investment in tourism, renewable energy and infrastructure. A major project under construction is the Dakhla Atlantic Port, valued at about $1.2bn, which is intended to strengthen maritime links between Africa, Europe and the Americas.
But running a large supermarket in Dakhla will bring challenges, particularly the cost of transporting goods over long distances.
The city is about 1,600km by road from Casablanca, one of the country’s main commercial centres. A heavy-goods truck can take an estimated 24 to 30 hours to make the journey, making regular deliveries of fresh food, dairy products and meat more difficult and expensive.
Local suppliers could help reduce some of these costs. Dakhla is one of the country’s main fishing centres, offering opportunities for the store to source seafood nearby. Many processed and packaged goods, however, will still need to be transported from elsewhere.
The Dakhla-Oued Ed-Dahab region has more than 150,000 residents, most of them living in Dakhla itself. Investment in infrastructure, tourism and renewable energy is helping to expand the local economy, while major projects are bringing workers, engineers and businesses to the area.
The new store could serve a growing customer base, including local families, foreign workers and public-sector employees. Its performance will depend on how much residents spend, the volume of goods sold and the cost of keeping shelves stocked.
Marjane’s arrival could also give it an early advantage over competitors such as Carrefour, operated by LabelVie Group, and Aswak Assalam. The information provided does not identify a comparable store operated by either rival in Dakhla.
Marjane is a subsidiary of Al Mada, a pan-African investment group. The company opened the country’s first hypermarket in Rabat in 1990. It also operates Marjane Market supermarkets, formerly known as Acima, and Electroplanet, an electronics retail chain.
The group has increasingly targeted cities beyond the main Casablanca-Rabat-Tangier economic corridor, including Kénitra, Ouarzazate, Laâyoune and now Dakhla.
At the opening of the Laâyoune hypermarket in March 2024, Marjane deputy general manager Mhamed Chlyeh said the company wanted to get closer to customers, offer a varied and competitively priced range of products, create local jobs and provide new sales opportunities for partner producers, farmers and cooperatives.
A hypermarket of a similar size typically creates an estimated 200 to 300 direct jobs, with a comparable number of indirect jobs in services such as security, cleaning and logistics. Marjane has not announced how many people it expects to employ at the Dakhla store.
