ETABLISSEMENTEN FRANZ COLRUYT NV

Colruyt Group was founded in 1928 and the family business has grown over three generations into a Retail group with more than 30.000 employees and a diverse portfolio of food and non-food formats, in Belgium (93% of revenue) and abroad. The biggest activity remains the food Retailer Colruyt, which has delivered on its brand promise of “Lowest Prices” day after day for 45 years. In 2020-2021, the revenue of Colruyt Group was 9.93 billion.

Today, Colruyt Group is active in Retail with around ten business formats, with both physical outlets and online shops in Belgium, Luxembourg and France (Cru, Bio-Planet, Bike Republic, Dreamland, …).

In addition, Colruyt Group also engages in the energy sector. On the one hand as a fuel distributor, DATS 24. On the other hand, also as a renewable energy producer and supplier (wind, solar, hydrogen, both on- as offshore).

To further curb its climate impact, Colruyt Group intends to make all its goods transport zero emission by 2035. Both for its own transports to and from the stores and to the distribution centres via suppliers, the Belgian retailer intends to fully deploy zero emission vehicles. The company will achieve this by using complementary technologies: both battery-electric vehicles and hydrogen-electric vehicles will be needed to make this transition happen. The ZEFES-project is part of the RD&I track to learn and prepare this transition on fleet level.

Colruyt Group will participate in the drafting of the requirements and performance indicators for supporting the fleet integration of HD ZEV in a typical regional distribution activity. The developed tools will be evaluated on the existing transport flow of the group. Lessons learned of previous projects will be shared and knowledge build up used to define the next steps towards a zero emission fleet.