Top 20 retail chains in Belgium 2022, by shop floor area

Which supermarket chain is Belgium’s leading food retailer? Well, the answer to that question depends entirely on your own definition. Depending on whether you measure shop floor area, revenue or number of stores, you might come up with a very different answer. Based on shop floor area, Belgium’s leading supermarket chain in 2022 was Carrefour Market, with over 546 thousand square meters of shop floor. Colruyt came third, with a shop floor area of roughly 447 thousand square meters. However, despite a considerably smaller shop floor area, Colruyt was significantly more successful than Carrefour in terms of revenue. In 2018, Colruyt’s revenue was 8.9 billion euros, whereas Carrefour reached a revenue of ‘just’ 4.6 billion euros that year.

 Chains by number of stores

  Carrefour’s shop floor area made up nearly 28 percent of the total shop floor area of supermarket chains in Belgium. Colruyt held 17.5 percent of the shop floor area. Per square meter of shop floor area, Colruyt made approximately 15,800 euros, much more than for example Delhaize, another food retail chain. Unfortunately, no figures regarding the sales per square meters were available for Carrefour.

 Chains by number of stores

  With regard to the number of stores, Carrefour’s main competitor was not Colruyt, but German hard discounter ALDI. In 2022, Belgium counted 442 ALDI stores. By comparison, Colruyt did not make it into the top 20 list of retailers with the most locations.