Colruyt Group refers to Ahold Delhaize cyber incident in an advert

The cyber incidents at Ahold Delhaize and in French supermarkets have inspired Collect&Go: the Colruyt Group’s grocery delivery service is responding to current events with a touch of humor and welcoming new customers with free delivery.

“Opinions were divided”

“For when everything goes haywire,” reads the ad that Collect&Go published in Belgian newspapers on Wednesday morning. The ad includes a promo code that gives new customers free delivery. With this, the retailer is capitalizing on the recent chaos among competitors: after all, the cyber incident at Ahold Delhaize has completely shut down online orders at Albert Heijn. At Delhaize, e-commerce is up and running, albeit with a limited number of delivery slots.

“Too soon? Inappropriate? We’ve had the discussion,” writes Collect&Go Director Pieterjan Nuitten on LinkedIn. “Opinions were divided. Because let one thing be clear: no one takes lightly the impact such attacks have on employees, customers, and companies. Jims was also recently affected by this. Behind every outage are teams working day and night to get everything up and running again. But at Collect&Go, we also believe that difficult moments don’t always have to be made even harder. It’s no coincidence that our playful touch is reflected in our logo. We take our work very seriously—but ourselves, a little less so.”

The tone at Jumbo in the Netherlands is quite different: “We’ve noticed that it’s busier in our stores and with online orders. Together with our colleagues, we’re doing everything we can to help customers as best we can. At the same time, our hearts go out to Albert Heijn, and we hope for them that this situation is resolved as quickly as possible,” the website states. Both Jumbo and the online grocery store Picnic are reporting an increase in orders now that the market leader’s website is down.