Ever since Lieven Vanlommel acquired Foodmaker in 2014, the company has been steadily marching on: following its Belgian expansion, it is now looking abroad and it aims to double its store network by 2020.
Two new markets
Foodmaker currently has eight stores: seven in Belgium and one in the Netherlands. Its recently opened location in Brussels is its first franchise store as well. “That was a one-off experiment”, Lieven Vanlommel told De Tijd. “We want to manage the restaurants ourselves, because we want to have full control over the entire piece of the chain.” It is also working on new stores in Antwerp and Hasselt.
Its foreign expansion had been rather limited until now, with a single store in the Netherlands, but it wants to alter that in the next few years. It has stores planned in the Netherlands (2 stores), Germany (2 stores) and Denmark (1 store), which should all open by 2020. “To guarantee the proximity of our production, we will build a new studio in Denmark.” These investments will cost about two million euro and to ensure that it does not overreach its expansion, the new stores will have to become profitable before it will continue its expansion.
Starmeal
Vanlommel also founded Starmeal, a company that supplies supermarkets with salads and juices. It employs about 200 people and will move to a new location, five times larger than its previous location, thanks to several dozen million euros invested by an anonymous German shareholder.
