The new owners of Superquinn are planning to spend €63 million revamping the chain's 21 stores over the next three years.

After a long absence, the chain has also declared itself to be back in the market for new sites and hopes to finalise a deal before Christmas for the opening of a new store at an unspecified site.

"The days are gone when Superquinn is not considered," said the Select Retail Holdings chief executive, Simon Burke.

The redevelopment initiative will start in January with a €3 million pilot scheme at the Superquinn store in Blanchardstown, Co Dublin. The new format store, with 15 per cent additional floor space, will be unveiled in April.

"If that refurbishment is a success, we intend to roll it out over the entire estate in Superquinn over the next three years," Mr Burke said. "We are not closing any stores."

Backed by property developers and Bernard McNamara and Gerry O'Reilly, the Select Retail Holdings consortium paid €450 million last August to buy the chain from Senator Feargal Quinn and his family.

Mr Burke made light of new figures from TNS, which indicate that Superquinn's market share has fallen to 8 per cent from 8.5 per cent. "I'm much more interested in what they're doing in a year's time."

Mr Burke is pitching Superquinn at the upper end of the market, but he said it was not appropriate for chain's pricing to be out of step with the rest of the market.

While he said this "wasn't always the case" with Superquinn, he hoped the demise the Groceries Order would not create an unstable market.

Superquinn is concentrating its Christmas marketing on a range of 30 "artisan-style" products, many of them from Ireland. These feature in new television adverts, to be broadcast from next week.

The chain also has a new coupon scheme in which customers who spend €65 receive vouchers entitling them to €100 in discounts on a set of products.

It is understood that the consortium's backers will seek planning permission within weeks for new apartment schemes over some of the chain's existing one-storey outlets. The most likely locations for the first developments are at its sites in Ballinteer and Knocklyon in Dublin.

Mr Burke, the accountant behind the successful relaunch of Hamley's toy store in London,said the chain's "single greatest crime" had been its failure to deliver product for its shelves.

"We've had to start work on those basic things. There's still a bit to go but we have got availability back up."

Mr Burke's aim is to drive the growth of the business by increasing the selection of food and by improving its quality.

"We feel very strongly that we have to have an exceptional range of products."

He said he refused to listen to people who said that Irish consumers would not like to have new products of better quality.

"We will certainly put these in front of them."