BELGIUM: Colruyt to start home delivery | Progresiv

Belgian supermarket chain Colruyt has announced it will start home deliveries in major cities like Antwerp and Brussels somewhere in 2019. The market leader feels obligated to follow its competitors Delhaize and Carrefour.

COO Frans Colruyt has revealed that his company will start delivering orders made through its web shop Collect&Go, which currently only works through pick-up points. However, the chain with the legendary austerity will not implement the service throughout Belgium: only inhabitants of its major cities will be able to get products delivered to their homes. The service would start next year in Antwerp, Brussels and Ghent, while expansion to Liège and Namur is also envisaged.

Colruyt responds to the threat of not only its competitors' home delivery programmes, but also that of e-commerce giants like Bol.com and Amazon. The deliveries would consist mainly of groceries: CEO Jef Colruyt admits his company is still looking for a non-food web shop as well, but he says to have "other priorities" for now.

The chain's main concern is how to make the deliveries financially and ecologically sustainable: "We want to deliver the groceries with CNG busses at the very least and want to switch to electric busses when that becomes a technical possibility, however we do not expect this to happen in the next five years", the COO says, even though Dutch online supermarket Picnic already has been using that transport mode for a few years. (www.retaildetail.eu)