Food retailer Ahold Delhaize enhances personalised customer experiences

Software company MuleSoft announced recently that international food retail group Ahold Delhaize is leveraging MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform to build personalised digital capabilities that will enhance direct-to-consumer relationships and enable further growth of its e-commerce businesses. MuleSoft added it is enabling Ahold Delhaize to securely scale these new digital capabilities across its local brands.

With more than 6,600 stores across the US, Europe and Indonesia, Ahold Delhaize is cited to be a leader in supermarkets and e-commerce and is at the forefront of sustainable retailing with a family of local brands that serve more than 50 million shoppers each week. With its omni-channel strategy, Ahold Delhaize is blending the best of bricks-and-mortar, delivery and pick-up, and MuleSoft is playing a role to future-proof Ahold Delhaize’s business by building an application network that can quickly incorporate new technologies and respond to changing consumer demands.

The new application and data integration strategy aims to transform the organisation into a composable enterprise that can rapidly connect applications in a self-service manner to drive competitive advantage. Application programming interfaces (APIs) play a critical role in Ahold Delhaize's IT strategy, allowing the organisation to process digital impact on the traditional retail business model while also keeping pace with the rapid growth in e-commerce.

Erik Roozeboom, director of integration strategy and architecture, Ahold Delhaize, said: “MuleSoft is a key enabler of the new data and application integration strategy and will support a host of strategic digital initiatives ensuring our local brands are equipped to stay ahead of the competition in this fast-changing retail world.”

Ahold Delhaize’s increased size and scale since the 2016 merger of Ahold and Delhaize Group have made having a comprehensive data and application integration strategy in place even more important for the organisation. In order to stay nimble and embrace new digital technologies quickly, Ahold Delhaize will leverage MuleSoft’s API-led connectivity approach. Roozeboom added: “By working with MuleSoft to deliver on an integration strategy centred around API-led connectivity, the Ahold Delhaize brands will be able to continue quickly delivering new best-in-class digital experiences to our customers at scale.”

Ahold Delhaize selected MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform for its ability to facilitate easy policy management, centralised governance and standardised API design across a broad spectrum of services while still providing the necessary autonomy to its individual brands to innovate at speed. In addition, Ahold Delhaize can take advantage of the platform’s design tooling to make it easy to rapidly build and deploy APIs connected to backend services, regardless of the underlying technology, according to the company.

Ahold Delhaize’s first initiative with Anypoint Platform is focusing on optimising product data management processes to provide a single view on product information and enable quicker reporting and analysis. Additionally, Ahold Delhaize said it is looking to leverage new e-commerce capabilities in the US, supported by MuleSoft.

By Muneerah Bee