After many years of growth and over 100 acquisitions, Dutch wholesale giant Sligro Food Group found itself operating within a complex landscape of aging and disconnected systems. With the support of Stibo Systems, the company is centralizing its master data, strengthening governance and quality, and enhancing its collaboration with suppliers.
Challenges
A long history of acquisitions and a complex technology environment
Founded in 1935, Sligro Food Group has grown from a single wholesale outlet to 50 outlets in the Netherlands and 15 in Belgium. Over the decades, the company expanded through repeated acquisitions of wholesalers, retailers, and even a supermarket chain. Each addition introduced new processes, data structures, and technology platforms, which gradually increased the complexity of Sligro’s information landscape.
This created a demanding environment. Food quality regulations require detailed traceability, customer expectations have evolved, and Sligro manages more than 75,000 products supplied by over 1,500 partners, including many private label brands. Data was stored across several platforms and warehouses, making consistency and accuracy difficult to maintain.
“For each acquisition over the years, some complexity in our IT or data landscape was added. Whether we were bringing a company’s systems into ours, or implementing our own, a layer of complexity was added each time.” Ronald de Jong, Business Expert, Article Data, Sligro
Daily operations reflected this reality. Teams relied on manual updates in spreadsheets, separate workflows for food standards and product photography, and a variety of unconnected systems. This created unnecessary effort, limited visibility, and introduced a steady risk of human error.
Digital transformation adds new stresses
Food wholesalers like Sligro also face a particular strain from ongoing digital transformation. Digital purchasing and fulfillment have added new expectations for speed and accuracy, while in-person buyer visits remain an important part of the commercial process. A kitchen might order most of its products online for convenient delivery, yet still visit its local cash and carry to explore new ideas and get inspired. Information that was traditionally exchanged in person now also needs to be available through digital channels, and the volume and variety of required data continues to grow.
For example, the company received 21.6 million unique online searches in 2023. At the same time, the company’s product lines grew; it added 7,000 new products across 1,100 categories. But this wasn’t a case of digital activity replacing physical visits. Each cash-and-carry location still prints around 20 million product labels annually.
Sligro succeeded in embracing digital transformation, but this has not replaced offline buying. The nature of Sligro’s business means that buyers shop both online and in-person. As a result, its master data needed to be accurate across all channels.
Rising regulatory demands
Regulatory compliance also requires businesses like Sligro and its suppliers to maintain accurate data on the origin and provenance of supplies. This is achieved through the Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN) interchange with suppliers.
On top of this, regulatory requirements were also increasing. The EU’s Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), as well as other packaging and environmental reporting requirements, create a strong incentive to maintain accurate and timely product data.
To summarize, Sligro faced the following challenges:
- Legacy-driven complexity and incompatibility: A fragmented and complex IT landscape constantly slowed progress
- Digital transformation added new stresses: As online ordering replaced and supplemented in-person visits, the volume and variety of data increased exponentially
- Regulatory compliance: Collecting and maintaining product data from 1,500 suppliers of varying sizes was difficult with existing systems
Solutions
Turning data and systems proliferation into a future-ready data platform
Sligro worked with Stibo Systems to address these challenges, implementing Stibo Systems Platform for master data management (MDM), which was initially hosted on AWS and then later migrated to Microsoft Azure in 2024.
Sligro selected the Stibo Systems Platform for its core MDM capabilities, including building workflows for creating golden records, photography, and record creation. These workflows are used to systematically clean the company’s product data.
The acquisition of Metro Belgium in 2023 allowed Sligro to test this implementation for the first time, proving that the Stibo Systems Platform could ease the integration challenges an acquisition represents.
Self-service success
A major benefit is the greater flexibility it provides. In the past, configuration changes and data refreshes required assistance from Stibo Systems. Now, both the operational and development teams at Sligro can make changes themselves, speeding up their response to new requests from the business. Now the development team at Sligro can focus on a single platform, rather than having to learn and manage many disparate, inherited solutions.
“There’s total focus on this new environment from the development department. There are constant improvements. If we need some support, we feel that the people we’re talking to really know the environment because they’re constantly working with it. They don’t need to worry about all the systems. They now work with just one environment.” Bas van Dijk, IT Product Line Manager, Procurement, Sligro
Future-ready MDM
With the new platform for MDM, ingesting data via GDSN finally became a reliable proposition. The product information provided by GS1 data pools such as Superunie and PS In Foodservice is now handled effectively.
The Stibo Systems Platform processes all inputs, either directly or via GDSN Receiver, converting them into golden records via multiple workflows. The output then goes to Sligro’s ecommerce platform, SAP Hybris, SAP Antwerpen, and local legacy ERP and MDM implementations from previous acquisitions.
The team at Sligro follows an agile approach, aiming for a minimum viable product before it begins phasing out older systems and platforms.
By updating and expanding its Stibo Systems environment, Sligro was able to achieve a number of business benefits:
- Centralized product data management: Sligro created a consistent data model for its 75,000+ SKUs by centralizing product master data with Stibo Systems
- Faster content creation with generative AI: Generative AI capabilities make it easier and faster for Sligro to create and localize marketing descriptions based on the product information in Stibo Systems Platform
- Better performance: By hosting Stibo Systems Platform on Microsoft Azure, previous performance issues around absorbing GDSN and other GS1 standardized data sets were eliminated
- Improved compliance: Using the new system, nutrition, allergen, packaging and emissions data is collected and handled centrally
- Future-ready architecture: Sligro’s new data platform collects, processes and synchronizes data across multiple systems, including new acquisitions
“We had some GDSN performance problems in the old environment... We don’t have any of those problems anymore.” Bas van Dijk, IT Product Line Manager, Procurement, Sligro
Generative AI for smarter content creation and global reach
Sligro will now leverage Stibo Systems’ generative AI content capabilities to further enhance its PIM. By using generative AI for smarter content creation and global reach, the company can automatically generate marketing-ready product descriptions and feature bullet points directly from structured product data in the platform. And by using Stibo Systems’ generative AI-assisted translation, Sligro will be able to localize product information seamlessly. The solution generates product texts directly in local languages from the same master data, ensuring accuracy, consistency and speed across all markets.
These future capabilities will not only streamline content creation but also strengthen customer engagement by delivering tailored and multilingual product information at scale.
Learn more about:
Outcomes
A successful escape from legacy with a view toward future horizons
At first glance, Sligro’s history of acquisitions in a sector known for thin margins, complex logistics, vendor relationships and intricate data challenges might appear like a recipe for ongoing difficulties. Each acquisition brought additional technologies, creating even greater complexity, reliance on manual processes and rising demands on product and technical teams.
Compounding these challenges, the need to handle and ingest large volumes of data from suppliers, data interchange services and AS/400 on-premises systems made regulatory compliance, labeling and tax calculations unnecessarily complicated and time-consuming.
The shift to a SaaS environment allowed Sligro to retire multiple aging systems and embrace a standardized approach. With this foundation in place, the business now has the tools to seamlessly integrate future acquisitions and support long-term growth.
Looking ahead, Sligro will also harness Stibo Systems’ generative AI content capabilities to automate the creation of marketing-ready product descriptions, feature bullet points, and localized content directly from master data. This will not only streamline content creation but also ensure accuracy across markets and enhance customer engagement through tailored, multilingual product information at scale.
