The Carrefour Group (Paris:CA), one of the world’s leading food retailers, today announces its acquisition of Dejbox, a pioneer in lunch delivery for business employees located in suburban and outlying areas.
With this acquisition, Carrefour expands its e-grocery offerings to include both a new product segment (ready-to-eat meals) and a new customer base (B2E, or the business-to-employee market), while furthering its ambition of becoming the leader in the Food Transition for all by providing an active clientele with balanced, everyday meals at prices that everyone can afford.
Founded in 2015 by two talented entrepreneurs, Adrien Verhack and Vincent Dupied, Dejbox is an online canteen for business employees. They can choose their lunch from a wide range of fresh, cooked and seasonal dishes for the cost of a restaurant voucher (€5.90 to €8.90) and have it delivered to their workplace at no charge. To capture this huge, fast-changing market, Dejbox created an intuitive online and mobile user interface as well as top-quality, inexpensive menu offerings and a streamlined logistics operation – all designed to meet the needs of the more than 10 million French employees who work in the urban hinterland and very rarely have access to an onsite dining service.
Operating in Lille, Lyon, Paris, Bordeaux, Nantes and Grenoble, plus hundreds more towns and cities located near those metropolises, Dejbox delivers over 400,000 meals each month. Its growth has been spearheaded by more than 300 workers, including 140 food preparers and delivery personnel employed directly by Dejbox – a factor that sets the company apart from other meal delivery platforms that rely heavily on gig-economy workers.
As part of the Carrefour Group, Dejbox will be able to expand its French operations at a rapid pace and very quickly move into international markets as well. In addition, one of Dejbox’s next steps is to speed growth in B2B services, an important growth driver insofar as it lets companies assume a portion of the cost of employee lunches simply by transferring funds virtually to each employee’s online Dejbox account.
By drawing on a system of smart delivery routes and a unique network of partner caterers and merchants from local communities, this top-notch foodtech company has successfully created a positive business model that is ideally suited to the recent trend towards food delivery, particularly among millennials.
“This acquisition, which reflects Carrefour’s desire to become the leader in grocery e-commerce, is a strategic on”, says Amélie Oudéa-Castera, Executive Director Customers, Services and Digital Transformation at Carrefour. “It will give us the opportunity to expand our customer base to include employees of medium-sized, small and micro businesses and also invest in the fast-growing food delivery segment with an offering rooted in quality and affordability.”
In the words of Dejbox co-founders Adrien Verhack and Vincent Dupied, “We made the strategic decision to join with Carrefour because we firmly believe it’s the best possible partner for helping us achieve our ambitious growth plans for Dejbox and for offering as many people as possible an online, affordable, sustainable and tasty alternative to a sandwich or a home-cooked meal.”
About the Carrefour Group
With a multi-format network of over 12,000 stores in more than 30 countries, the Carrefour Group is one of the world’s leading food retailers. Carrefour welcomes 105 million customers throughout the world and generated sales of €84.916 billion in 2018. It employs over 360,000 people who help to make Carrefour the world leader in the food transition for everyone, providing everybody with access to high-quality, affordable food every day, no matter where they are.
For more information, visit www.carrefour.com, or find us on Twitter (@GroupeCarrefour) and LinkedIn (Carrefour).
About Dejbox
Dejbox is the biggest online canteen and leader in the meal delivery market for businesses located in suburban and outlying areas. Thanks to its logistics hubs in Lille, Lyon, Paris, Bordeaux, Nantes and Grenoble and its network of partner caterers and craftspeople, Dejbox delivers more than 400,000 meals each month in hundreds of cities and communities. Today, the start-up has just over 300 employees, including 140 full-time food preparers and delivery personnel, who are helping to make Dejbox Europe’s largest online lunch canteen, intent on offering a wide range of quality food options to every employee at the best possible price.
To learn more, visit www.dejbox.fr and www.pro.dejbox.fr
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