October 15, 2024 – To stay fresh and innovative within the retail world, it's important to take the time to get inspired with new ideas and connect with existing suppliers and innovative new companies. The annual Groceryshop conference in Las Vegas is the perfect opportunity to do just that.
To kick off this year’s Groceryshop event, our CEO Frans Muller had the honor of hosting the keynote opening on stage together with Melissa Repko, retail reporter for CNBC New York. Frans took more than 3,500 people in the audience on a journey of what we at Ahold Delhaize are working on day in, day out. As not everyone knows Ahold Delhaize – but they certainly know Food Lion, Stop & Shop, The GIANT Company, Giant Food or Hannaford from their own shopping experiences – Frans and Melissa explained how next to being the largest retail group on the U.S. east coast, Ahold Delhaize’s brands across the pond are #1 or #2 in all of our markets in Europe. Frans also zoomed in on what’s important for us: staying closely connected to the 63 million customers our brands serve every week and how our new company strategy, Growing Together, is guiding our vision to be your most trusted local food retailer.
Business cases for AI and GenAI
Next stop in the conversation was innovation and how Ahold Delhaize invests heavily in AI and Generative AI solutions. Frans shared the example of dynamic markdowns in The Netherlands, where Albert Heijn uses AI to mark down products nearing expiration every 15 minutes. This provides great value to customers, and it reduced more than 250 tons of food waste in its first year. Frans also shared how our U.S. brands introduced Gen AI-based semantic search, allowing customers to search for products by intent, rather than keyword search. For example, “birthday ideas for 8 year-olds”, would in the past show limited results. Now, it shows birthday cakes, decorations and more, enhancing customer experience and boosting revenue. These are just some of the many examples of innovation going on.
Setting strong targets on private brand
When a company like Ahold Delhaize sets a strong target, you get questions. Melissa asked about the companywide target of growing towards 45% of private brand food sales by 2028. Frans explained how private brands (or labels) offer great value as they allow us to be innovative and agile (in terms of price, packaging, reformulations and time to market). At the same time, we believe in a strong balance of private brand and national brands for our customers. And every market has its own diamond mix for private brand sales, depending on the customer preferences. In the Benelux for example, private brand makes around 50% of sales, while in the U.S. it makes 30% of sales.
Growing retail media
Our target for complementary revenue streams also intrigued Melissa, especially the retail media side of this. How does Ahold Delhaize and our local brands make sure customers receive personalized promotions and suggestions, without losing great customer experience? At Ahold Delhaize, we believe retail media actually enhances the customer experience. The promotions you’re seeing as a customer, need to relate to you – offering promotions on the products you usually buy, or suggesting a similar product that might be nice to explore. Strong data and strong data protection is at the heart of all of this.
While several other topics were discussed in the keynote opening, there are three key takeaways from Frans that we’d like to share:
- Omnichannel is and will remain the way forward. It’s all about the seamless customer experience via all our channels, connected via our loyalty system.
- The local brand strategy is sometimes challenged because it can reduce efficiency. The advantage of having true local connections to those local communities, to have that brand that you know and trust, overcompensates for this tremendously. Ahold Delhaize is harmonizing the ‘back office’, but will always leave room for the local brands to shine.
- Great people. Our company exists because of the dedication our amazing colleagues show every day.
That concludes the highlights from a busy and buzzing Groceryshop conference.
If you have any questions around these topics, please contact the Ahold Delhaize external communications team via Media.Relations@aholddelhaize.com.
