Carrefour Bets Big on Discount Format and Private Label

Alexandre Bompard, CEO of Carrefour, has announced the company’s plans for the coming three years. Amongst others, it is going to expand its discount banners. First there is Supeco, its soft-discounter banner, which is originally from Spain and is now also present in Europe in Italy, Poland and Romania. The successful banner is to expand from 120 stores today to 200+ stores by 2026, particularly in Spain.

Then we have Atacadão, a very popular hard discounter chain in Brazil. The store network is to grow by twenty to thirty stores per reach to 470 by 2026. Carrefour will bring this banner to France in the fall of 2023. The Atacadão stores do not look like regular supermarkets, but rather like large warehouses with basic merchandising.

Products are sold on pallets, in boxes or on metal racks and there are fewer SKUs, around 9,000. The format relies on large volumes instead of depth of range. The more you buy in large quantities, the lower the price, between 10 and 15 percent lower than in other stores. The chain works with every day low prices so there are no promotional items.

Among Carrefour’s plans is a goal to place its own brands at the heart of its commercial model. The target is to increase the private label share in food from 33 to 40% and in non-food, the private label share is to grow from 32% now to 50% of the permanent range by 2026.