Belgian online supermarket Hopr has closed its virtual doors: as a national roll-out never materialised, the store never reached a large enough scale to become profitable.
End of a chapter
“Sorry, we have closed our online supermarket Hopr for good. Unfortunately, we did not manage to roll out nationally. Thank you for your enthusiasm and interest. It was a great and, above all, very informative trip!” That is the only message left on the Hopr website.
“Last week, I closed the virtual doors of online supermarket Hopr for good. An adventure full of innovation, challenges and valuable lessons”, founder Stijn Martens added on LinkedIn. “Entrepreneurship is about daring to dream, taking risks and sometimes deciding to let go. This is the end of a chapter, but I remain proud of what we have put in place and the impact we have made.”
Hopr was launched in 2021, but never succeeded in its ambition to reach nationwide coverage after five years. Martens had hoped to make a difference with superior service and dreamt of building a kind of marketplace for food retail, but due to a lack of scale, the online supermarket was unable to fulfil those ambitions.
