Ahold Delhaize, the Dutch retail conglomerate formed by the merger of Ahold and the Delhaize Group in July 2016, is flexing its Delhaize brand in Belgium with new store formats focused on convenience and prepared food, plus digital solutions that enable online ordering and in-store pickup.

In October, Delhaize opened its smallest format to date, Fresh Atelier, a convenience concept focusing on ready-to-eat items. The first compact, 80-square-meter (860-square-foot) store located near Brussels Central Station offers a mix of fresh meal solutions, on-the-go shopping and pickup points for online ordering from Delhaize.be.

“This is an example of ‘instant retail,’ in which offline and online shopping and on-the-go are combined for the first time in this way,” said Delhaize Belgium CEO Xavier Piesvaux. The concept is aimed at urban customers, who are familiar with digital technology and want to save time but still eat healthily.

The store’s premium coffee, Tasty & Honest, is highly visible to customers entering the store. It’s a self-serve, bean-to-cup solution rather than barista-brewed, but the coffee is high-quality. Also located near the entrance is an appetizing salad bar operated by The Foodmaker, which partners with Delhaize in more than 30 stores. Alongside it, there’s a Sushi Gourmet self-serve counter, targeting to-go customers.

At the store’s center is the Fresh Atelier counter. Here, sandwiches, baguettes, smoothies, soups and hot meals are prepared on the spot—including daily specials that allow for menu innovation. According to retail analyst firm IGD, rotating the food offerings—something seen at very few retailers—is a great way to drive repeat visits during the week.

Grab-and-go options are easy to find, with hot food displayed alongside a range of salads and wraps. These are conveniently located near the snacks and dips, cold drinks and a small chilled beer and wine display.

Checkout is done efficiently with Quickscan cash registers. Delhaize expects a scan-and-pay app will be available early in 2019.

In addition to its strong food-to-go focus, the store serves as a hub for online orders from Delhaize.be, with a dedicated pickup area that accommodates both ambient and chilled items. Prominent Delhaize.be branding helps the retailer promote the availability of 15,000 SKUs, far more than what the store can stock within its small footprint.

A second site with a larger footprint is scheduled to open in early 2019. According to Delhaize, there’s the potential to open another 200 Fresh Atelier sites in the next three years.

Supermarket Concept

This new convenience concept followed hot on the heels of Delhaize’s new supermarket concept in Nivelles in September. Like its smaller sister, the store features the Fresh Atelier counter, targeting shoppers looking for ready-to-eat fresh food that is prepared daily using healthy recipes.

According to Delhaize, the supermarket concept leaves behind the classic store design to respond to the ever-evolving expectations of today’s consumer. “Delhaize is listening more than ever to its customers in order to respond even better to their current needs,” said Piesvaux.

The store layout reflects the retailer’s understanding of changing shopper behavior. The Fresh Atelier counter is located right inside the entrance for those in need of a quick food fix, while shoppers seeking conventional grocery items take a different path through the store. “Customers in the new store can choose a shorter route for smaller convenience purchases or an intuitive route for more extensive shopping,” according to the Delhaize website. “Heavier products, such as beverages, are at the start [of the route] so they can be placed at the bottom of the cart while the frozen department is at the end of the route, to keep things as cold as possible.”

In-Store Digital Experience

Just as at the convenience concept, Delhaize promotes the digital experience in-store. In addition to picking up products they order via Delhaize.be, Nivelles customers also can order online while shopping, through five kiosks positioned within aisles at the store. This means that in addition to the 20,000 SKUs offered in the store, hundreds of additional products are available for next-day pickup or home delivery.

The in-store online ordering facility was developed in collaboration with the digital design and user experience studio This Place, which has been working with Delhaize to enhance its digital capability for four years across four of the retailer’s brands. According to This Place projects director, Fabian Frei, the aim of the Delhaize initiative was twofold: to showcase online-exclusive products that could not be displayed in the store, and to entice users into the digital offering.

“Customers would come into the store and not be aware of the rich e-commerce experience they could have on the web and mobile, either via a browser or app,” Frei said. “The screens are a tool to drive people online and show Delhaize’s digital experience.” The kiosks are category-focused on wine, pet, beauty and baby and located in the relevant aisles.

According to Frei, the project had unique challenges. “When a shopper is in-store, they don’t have much time and are on a mission,” he said. “They are not in the right mind space to browse a full e-commerce website. We didn’t want to disrupt or inconvenience them, so simplicity is key and the users get what they want quickly.”

The technology leverages existing functionality in the Delhaize app, which enables shoppers to scan barcodes to access product details. At the wine kiosk, for example, shoppers can browse 300 online-exclusive wines by categories such as grape and region, then use the Delhaize app to scan the barcode of the product they want. The product will appear on the user’s mobile phone, where they can add it to their basket and purchase. “There’s no typing in an email on a big screen and password, which has data protection issues because it’s a shared computer,” said Frei.

While this system is still very new, Frei said Delhaize already has rolled out the technology to a second store based on strong customer response. The endless-aisle technology also could have legs in smaller-footprint stores with space constraints, where retailers could showcase a much deeper offer and add the convenience of online ordering for home delivery or store pickup.