At its 2021 Investor Day, Ahold Delhaize announced the next chapter of its Leading Together strategy, which outlines key plans and targets toward 2025. The company also discussed its supply chain transformation in the U.S.

Powered by its local brands, the company's growth and investment plan underpins Ahold Delhaize’s vision to deliver the leading local food shopping experience for customers, placing value and convenience at the heart of its strategy. In addition, the company announced its intention to significantly step up investments in digital and automation, and increase focus and attention on accelerating its health and sustainability agenda.

“Our Leading Together strategy has proven to be strong in recent years, and is a great foundation as we head into the future," said Frans Muller, president and CEO of Ahold Delhaize. "The COVID-19 pandemic put our people and our strategic choices to the test, and through it all we were able to always deliver for our customers, our communities and our associates in all the brands and support companies. I cannot stress enough how proud I am of our achievements. The pandemic has accelerated the pace of change in the retail industry. It has also changed consumer behavior permanently with people shopping more online, eating more at home and having a bigger interest in local and healthier food.”

Building on the Leading Together strategy, the company has identified four priorities to double down on between now and 2025:

• Serve customers through deeper digital relationships across our omnichannel Customer Value Proposition
• Accelerate development of/investments in omnichannel capabilities and continue to be the best local operators
• Lead the transformation into a healthy and sustainable food retail system
• Leverage the portfolio to create the ultimate ecosystem for smarter local customer journeys

Investing in Digital proposition
Ahold Delhaize and its great local brands exist to help people eat well, save time and live better. Customers are looking for high value, convenient and personalized solutions — and shop whenever and wherever they want. Ahold Delhaize will invest in its brands to provide shoppers relevant products and services, promotions, tailored customer experiences and premium subscription memberships. To enable customers to shop in this way, Ahold Delhaize will accelerate its investments in building scalable and repeatable operational capabilities, with a sharper focus on digital, online, data and automation.

In doing so, Ahold Delhaize expects to accelerate net sales growth with $11.44 billion in incremental sales 2023-25. Net consumer online sales are planned to double between 2021 and 2025. In addition, Ahold Delhaize plans to have eCommerce profitable on a fully allocated basis by 2025.

Establishing one of the largest supply chain networks on the U.S. East Coast
In 2019, Ahold Delhaize USA launched its supply chain transformation, focused on bringing back its supply chain as it builds out its omnichannel network and adding new facilities in key geographies.

“With these changes, Ahold Delhaize USA will have full control of its supply chain and an optimized network at scale, which enables the local brands to better serve their customers, allows ADUSA to continue to invest in automation and digital capabilities to lower costs to serve, and ultimately enables direct to customer relationships as part of its omnichannel network," Kevin Holt, CEO, Ahold Delhaize USA. "The transformation will create one of the largest supply chain networks on the East Coast. It is scheduled to be finished in April 2024, with 26 facilities in the integrated self-distribution network.”

Increasing focus on health and sustainability
Ahold Delhaize will further invest in, sharpen and strengthen its initiatives towards a healthy and sustainable food retail system. Amongst other sharpened ambitions, the company is bringing forward its scope one and two targets by committing to reach net-zero carbon emissions across its own operations no later than 2040 and to becoming a net-zero business across its entire supply chain, products and services by 2050 (scope three).

Further, Ahold Delhaize has joined the Business Ambition for 1.5°C, a global coalition of UN agencies, business and industry leaders, in partnership with the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) and the UN led campaign ‘Race to Zero’. These and other ESG metrics will make up a bigger part of executive incentive programs going forward and will be supported by increased transparency going forward.

“We realize that these are ambitious targets which require a lot of work over the coming years, and we feel encouraged by our double AA rating upgrade by MSCI and recently confirmed DJSI leadership position," said Muller. "But most importantly we are confident that these and the other targets included in today’s strategy update are achievable because of our highly engaged and committed associates.”