Grocery giant Carrefour’s Belgian operation has successfully turned the page on declining like-for-likes and store closures.

Carrefour Belgium is an operation rarely commented upon at length but with hindsight, the country can be seen as a prelude to the giant grocer’s global turnaround, having successfully turned the page on declining like-for-likes and store closures.

A key initiative was the complete refurbishment of its 45 Belgian hypermarkets as well as an effort on other variables such as pricing.

Carrefour Belgium is now confident that its assortment breadth, combined with promotions and its loyalty programme, are attractive credentials against dominant price-aggressive competitors which offer relatively limited assortment.

That confidence seems to be confirmed by Carrefour’s solid same-store performances, even though it is hard to determine the extent to which it has benefited from the faltering of rival Delhaize. “We check competitors’ prices and we constantly align,” Carrefour Belgium managing director François-Melchior de Polignac has pointed out to L’Echo newspaper.

That said, Carrefour seems to take a different approach to repel the cross-border incursion of Ahold’s Albert Heijn banner, preferring to refund several times the price difference to shoppers, which indicates how seriously the new arrival is being taken. 

Building on past years’ efforts, Belgium has emerged as one of the retailer’s laboratories, either in terms of grocery ecommerce or on big boxes. In the second half of 2015 it unveiled the “hypermarket of the future”. 

We would expect a concept that builds on Carrefour’s work to date in creating online and offline synergies, similar to its Villeneuve la Garenne outlet in France last year. Carrefour reportedly sees room for another four to six new hypermarkets in this mature market, probably in the Flemish region of the country, where its footprint is less well established.

Carrefour is, however, still keen to further develop its store portfolio, even if it seems to have some fine-tuning to do. For grocery click-and-collect, Carrefour Belgium pursues a similar path to France, favouring  units located at hypermarkets rather than standalone pick-up sites.

The latter are “still a laboratory, but not really conclusive at the moment”, Polignac admitted.

The retailer is piloting a new banner dubbed “Easy Caddy” which is understood to be a response to rival Colruyt’s expanding OKay compact supermarkets. Even so, the banner remains in a phase of experimentation and we do not expect a major roll-out this year.   

  • Gildas Aitamer, retail analyst, Planet Retail