Premier is celebrating its 25-year anniversary with its biggest-ever scratchcard giveaway featuring £1.2 million-worth of prizes.

Premier brand director Martyn Parkinson said the brand – which was created in 1994 with 200 stores – had enjoyed 17 years of consecutive growth, and now had 3,350 stores serving 16m consumers every week. Last year it reached a milestone £1bn wholesale business.

In celebration Premier retailers can look forward to a year of activity to help drive footfall. The scratchcard giveaway launches in June, and includes a Mini Cooper as the top prize, plus £700,000 of instant-win prizes, meaning each Premier store will have, on average 200 individual winners. There will also be support for retailers through mega deals; plus £25,000 will be donated to 100 local good causes.

Parkinson said retailers face two big challenges of declining footfall and increasing costs, so the company was working hard to help build a model that gives retailers closer to a 30% margin than the current 23-25%.

“We’ve got to look at other avenues, such as food to go and coffee,” he said.

The Premier brand appears on just 130 forecourts, but Parkinson said more service station operators were making enquiries for a full convenience offer.

“We’ll work with forecourts where they make enquiries. Premier-based forecourts tend to be in a rural location. The brand fits a forecourt with a more value-focused offer. Otherwise we would most likely direct them to one of the other Booker symbol brands, such as Londis. We’ve got four great symbols within the group so we can target any demographic.”