How Ahold Delhaize built their first digital grocery store

The client

Our client is one of the world’s most successful grocery companies and has a long-lasting legacy in the Dutch market. There are few retailers that drive such strong feelings from their customers, and they have true customer loyalty in Europe.

The challenge

One of the key focus areas in the organization’s strategy was to accelerate growth in-store. With major players like Amazon shifting their strategy and pressuring the market this has become a major priority. This comes as competition is readily steepening in the sector and there is further demand being put on businesses to innovate. To do so the organization was looking to create a digital store of the future vision that had close alignment to IT to bring the vision to life.

The approach

We worked closely with our client over a 6-week period to conduct internal interviews, external customer research, and bring market examples to solve this problem. The first phase was to understand the store strategy, roadmap and integrate our SME knowledge of the consumers and market. Once we had collected this information, we opened the floor for internal people to challenge and add to our view in a “garage session” – a full-day workshop to take feedback and inputs to our collaborative work. From here we adjusted our ideas and prepared to run an intense Design Thinking Sprint to ideate and visualise what we were trying to achieve, thus bringing IT and design together to create a vision that can be achieved.