Colruyt Group scales digital asset management
Colruyt Group’s SmartWithFood division serves up efficiency with Scaleflex’s Visual Experience platform, writes Miya Knights, Retail Technology Publisher
Colruyt Group has collaborated with Scaleflex to improve its digital media management and e-commerce functions.
Founded in 1928 and still family-owned, the Group is a major Belgian retail and wholesale company with diverse food and non-food brands, known for its discount supermarkets (Colruyt), convenience stores (OKay), organic stores (BIO-planet), and various other formats in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg, focusing on low prices, sustainability, and customer convenience.
By implementing Scaleflex’s Visual Experience Platform, which includes its digital asset management (DAM) and Cloudimage optimisation tools, the retailer has enhanced website and app performance, simplified internal workflows, and increased the importance of visual content in boosting customer engagement and conversions.
Retail Technology conducted an email Q&A with Filip Champagne, Business Development Director at SmartWithFood, a Colruyt Group company, to learn more about the deployment, its impact on both customers and staff, and how it aligns with Colruyt’s broader digital strategy.
From recipes to revenue
According to Champagne, Colruyt Group’s partnership with Scaleflex originated in a broader digital transformation centred on content-driven commerce.
“Some six years ago, Colruyt Group started a shift towards more centralised recipe management,” he explained. “This was part of a strategic move to build stronger customer loyalty through rich, inspirational content. By developing technology that converts recipes directly into shopping baskets, we began to see recipes not just as marketing tools but as revenue-generating assets.”
This focus on operational efficiency is fundamental to the Group’s DNA. “Our main brand promise is to offer the lowest price for every product at any time,” Champagne added. “That can only be achieved by focusing 1,000% on efficiency.”
Deploying the DAM at speed
When SmartWithFood evaluated DAM solutions, speed to deployment was key.
“We wanted to integrate a DAM fast, without waiting to align it with Colruyt Group’s broader technology stack,” said Champagne. “Although the Group had its own in-house DAM, it would have taken longer to implement. Scaleflex offered a faster, smoother integration, supported by a very responsive development team.”
Originally conceived as a temporary solution, the Scaleflex platform quickly proved its value. “After a year of operations, we benchmarked our setup against the Group’s DAM and found Scaleflex to be more cost-efficient,” he noted. “When you add great support and strong SLA [service level agreement] compliance, it became clear we made the right choice.”
Delivering more reliable customer experiences
Colruyt’s recipe-driven services are mission-critical for customer engagement. Champagne said that Scaleflex’s platform has delivered consistent performance and uptime across more than five years of operation.
“Our KPIs [key performance indicators] are mainly response time and availability,” he explained. “Since we began collaborating with Scaleflex, we’ve never experienced a breach of SLA, which is remarkable. While it’s hard to quantify the value of faster content delivery, we certainly know the cost of downtime — a recipe service that’s unavailable has a direct impact on our bottom line.”
Streamlining workflows across brands
Internally, the DAM has unified content operations across multiple Colruyt Group banners.
“We integrated the DAM nearly headless, so it’s accessed through our own recipe management interfaces,” said Champagne. “By using a centralised repository, we now provide a uniform, integrated solution across all marketing departments and content providers. It’s a centralised system in a decentralised business environment, improving productivity and enabling content sharing across brands.”
This approach has allowed SmartWithFood to treat recipe data as master content, serving multiple teams and systems through a unified workflow.
Visual content as a growth lever
As customer expectations for rich, fast, and personalised digital experiences grow, Colruyt sees visual content as an increasingly strategic asset.
“We recognise that visuals drive recipe engagement and play a key role in SEO [search engine optimisation] and geo-targeting,” Champagne said. “We have a roadmap to enrich our 20,000-strong recipe catalogue to keep it relevant — enhancing visuals and metadata to create more attractive experiences for users, particularly through our multi-brand XTRA app.”
He added that content and visuals will increasingly align with the Group’s sustainability and health values. “We want our visual content to reflect what the Group stands for.”
Scaling for the future
Looking ahead, Champagne said the next phase of the project will focus on cross-brand content sharing and automated visual adaptation.
“Our next step is to start sharing content across brands — but each brand has its own graphic language and content guidelines,” he noted. “That means visuals will need to be adapted, potentially through AI-generated variants, with automated watermarking and more sophisticated metadata management. We already know Scaleflex can help us achieve those goals cost-effectively.”
For now, two DAM systems coexist within the Colruyt Group — Scaleflex for recipe content and the Group’s internal platform for product imagery — but that may change. “Who knows what the future might bring,” Champagne concluded.
By integrating Scaleflex’s cloud-based DAM and visual optimisation capabilities, Colruyt Group’s SmartWithFood division has turned content efficiency into a competitive advantage — streamlining workflows, ensuring reliability, and enhancing the customer experience across its digital ecosystem.
