We go because we have to... almost
Walk into Jumbo Foodmarkt and something is different, in the best way. You came for groceries, but the first thing that greets you is the warmth of a pizza oven. Then sushi being rolled behind glass, unexpectedly sophisticated. The smell of bread doing its ancient work. Suddenly I am craving everything: comfort food, freshly made, welcoming me in. Shopping quietly turns into strolling. For a moment, you forget this is an errand.
Now think about your regular run. The list, the fluorescent light, the beeping scanners. Few places see more of daily life than the supermarket, and almost none are designed to make that life feel better. We go because we have to.
Somewhere between the bakery we want to visit and the supermarket we have to visit, the future of food retail will be shaped. And I think a family company from Veghel is closer to it than it realizes.
What it holds
Jumbo grew from a single store into 732, around a fifth of the Dutch market, with 10.64 billion euro in revenue in 2025. It did it while staying family-owned and, importantly, stubbornly warm. Take the formula apart and you find three moves, each one deliberate.
They chose warmth as strategy, before it was a trend. In 2021, a Jumbo in Vlijmen opened a Kletskassa (chatty checkout): a checkout deliberately made slower, for people whose supermarket trip might also be the conversation of their day. Jumbo has since extended that thinking into Kletswandelingen, neighborhood walks launched across the country in 2025. The point is bigger than a nice initiative: Jumbo decided that human connection belongs inside the job of a supermarket. In an industry obsessed with seconds per transaction, it made slowness a service.
The Foodmarkt is a rehearsal for the future. Thirteen of them now, and the renewed Leidsche Rijn location shows where the thinking goes: fresh theaters where sushi, pizza and bread are made in the open, a borrel world of cheese and cured meat, a green grill for plant-based cooking, and local heroes woven through the shelves, the baker, the city brewer, the limoncello made nearby. 48,000 customers a week come to a supermarket that behaves like a food hall. An experience, worth the visit.
Scale with local soul. Under the platform (H)eerlijk van Dichtbij, Jumbo puts farmers and growers back into the story of what we eat, and stretches the idea of local into the future: since this spring, five hundred stores carry salads and herbs from Growy, a vertical farm in Amsterdam, shiso included, grown without pesticides a bike ride from the shelf. It answers one of the deepest currents in food right now, the return to real: we want to know again where our food comes from and who made it.
The gap worth designing
When anything can be delivered, the store splits into two futures. One is logistics: the errand handled for you, the store reduced to a pickup point. The other is culture: the store as the place where food becomes interesting again. A place to discover, taste, learn, meet and linger. A moment to look forward to.
The consumer is already voting. We queue at sourdough bakeries and return to the greengrocer who knows our name. The word artisan is having its biggest cultural moment in a hundred years. And at the luxury end, grocery has become identity: Erewhon in Los Angeles sells twenty dollar smoothies that are really memberships of a lifestyle, and this winter Meadow Lane opened in Tribeca, a store so considered that you wonder whether the word supermarket still applies. The signal under all of it: people will still show up for a store experience that means something. Everything else gets ordered.
Jumbo knows this, the Foodmarkt proves it, but the Foodmarkt is thirteen stores. And they are giants: thousands of square meters, destinations you travel to. Years ago Jumbo tried a small city version, on a station, and it leaned the other way, speed for commuters. What has never been made is the version in between: small and warm. The neighborhood store where the Foodmarkt feeling fits inside five hundred meters, especially in the cities, where life is lived on foot and the kitchen is around the corner. Because the other seven hundred stores are, for all their quality, still places we have to go. The light is for restocking, the soundtrack is a radio playlist, the pace is set by the scanner beep. The warmth that lives in the Kletskassa has not yet reached the architecture. No space in Dutch daily life is visited more, and no space expects less of the visit.
There is the opportunity of the decade, sitting in plain sight.
If I held the pen
Let's see what the future could hold. Three chapters I would design.
Split the errand from the experience. Start with the honest question nobody in food retail likes to ask out loud: who actually wants to be here. The family does the big run once a week and wants it over with. The twenty-something comes four times a week because dinner is a decision made at six. Two completely different lives, one identical row of aisles. Is that honestly how we want to serve them? So untangle it. The routine moves to the app: your list builds itself, recipes attach to it, the week's basics stand ready at an easy pickup, done in two minutes. And the mission of the app: making your week healthier without asking you to think about it, tuned to who you actually are and what you need. The gym bro gets his protein sorted, the family with two working parents and one picky eater gets dinners everyone eats, the household that wants organic gets it without reading a single label. Your groceries simply start taking care of you. And the store, freed from the errand, becomes what it always wanted to be: an experience center. Hubs instead of aisles. The living room where the neighborhood meets, the local makers with something happening, the fresh theaters, the thing to taste this week. You collect your basics and then you wander, because now there is something to wander into. And here is the part that protects the numbers: the unplanned purchase, the quiet engine of every supermarket's KPIs, does not disappear when the errand goes digital. It moves. Impulse born from boredom in aisle seven becomes impulse born from inspiration at the tasting table, and inspired impulse spends more. The app plans your healthy week, the pickup makes it effortless, the floor makes you curious. Easy where you want easy, alive where you want life. That is what seamless should actually mean.
The living room of the neighborhood. Jumbo already discovered that a supermarket is social infrastructure. The Kletskassa is world-class concept thinking disguised as kindness. Now zoom in on that proposition: the coffee corner that knows the regulars, the store as the place where the village still exists, also in a city. The wellness world keeps rediscovering that community is the new luxury, and Jumbo owns more daily human contact than any gym, app or club in the country. That is an asset no competitor can order from a wholesaler. Imagine swapping your usual coffee place for the cozy nook of your neighborhood supermarket, providing a feeling of belonging.
From selling food to hosting food culture. Today the Foodmarkt shows food being made. The next step: the everyday store that lets you discover something new, that brings you closer to food. The seasonal product, explained by the grower on the shelf card. A forgotten Dutch classic, brought back each month. This is the one advantage online can never copy: the products to taste, the people to show you, all under one roof. So keep asking, of every square meter: what can this store offer that a delivery app never can. That question is the whole strategy.
Three doors into a landscape of opportunities. Which one is worth walking through for Jumbo? And when?
A foresight perspective every brand can act on
Zoom out from the brand, and three larger movements come into view.
First, the errand economy is dissolving. Everything that is only a task will be automated, delivered, predicted. What survives in physical retail is what earns the trip. For supermarkets this is existential: the store must become a destination or become a warehouse.
Second, health is moving to the plate. Governments, insurers and families are all arriving at the same conclusion: the health of a country may be shaped more by its grocery stores than by its hospitals. The chain that makes healthy the easy default, the week planned in the app before temptation gets a vote, becomes something no competitor can undercut on price: the store that quietly takes care of your family.
Third, the learning from the Kletskassa is one every brand can take home. Decide where you want to create value, one clear proposition, and commit to it completely. Jumbo chose human connection, in a world growing lonelier, and went all the way to a checkout that takes its time. That depth is what makes a brand stand out, and it is where customers truly connect: one value, felt for real.
And underneath all three, the question I would bring to Jumbo's leadership, with a new decade to define. What is a supermarket for, when the groceries can arrive without the visit. The companies that answer from their essence, and Jumbo's essence is warmth at scale, will write the next chapter of food retail. The ones that answer with efficiency alone will end up competing with the delivery van, and lose.
How to navigate the landscape
The transferable move, for any brand. Find out where your category has become a have-to, and design the want-to. Every industry has its errand: the pharmacy run, the bank matter, the insurance call. The first competitor who makes that chore feel pleasant will show your customers what they were settling for. And once they have felt the difference, they switch.
Jumbo turned a checkout into an act of care, and I write that with admiration, because the smallest ideas that come from essence beat the biggest ideas that come from benchmarks. The brand that now brings that same care to every square meter of seven hundred ordinary stores will do more than win market share. It will give the most routine twenty minutes of life back to the people living it.
The bakery figured it out long ago: people return to places that feel like somebody expected them. The supermarket that learns this will never be an errand again. Who writes it.
I develop multisensory concepts for retail, hospitality and wellbeing brands. Curious what this lens would reveal about your concept? My door is open.