Dirk Depoorter, general manager of Retail Partners Colruyt Group, will next year lead the European retail alliance Agecore, which has been regularly in the news in recent years due to trade disputes with major FMCG suppliers.
As of March 1st
In a press release Agecore announces the appointment of Dirk Depoorter as new Chief Executive Officer. Depoorter was already a member of the Board of Directors of the organisation. To date, he is a member of the Executive Committee and Chief Purchase Officer of Colruyt Group, as well as Managing Director of Retail Partners Colruyt Group, the organisation of the Spar franchise chain within the retail group. He was also one of the architects of retail alliance Coopernic, the forerunner of AgeCore.
Dirk Depoorter will stop all functions, roles and responsibilities at Colruyt Group by the end of February 2021 to take up the role of CEO at AgeCore from 1 March, in close cooperation with Ivana Mollo, Head of International Brands Division & Deputy Managing Director.
“We are very pleased to have Dirk Depoorter on board as CEO of AgeCore. We are confident that with Dirk’s extensive retail experience, the continuity of AgeCore and its success will be assured,” said Augustin Marcaide, Chairman of the Board of Directors.
Six members
Retail alliance Agecore was founded in 2015 and currently has as members Colruyt (Belgium), Edeka (Germany), Intermarché (France), Coop (Switzerland), Conad (Italy) and Eroski (Spain). Together they represent a turnover of some 140 billion euro. In September, top executive Gianluigi Ferrari unexpectedly announced that he would leave Agecore. He was known in the sector as a flamboyant figure who liked to compare himself to Robin Hood. With Depoorter as his successor, a break in style seems obvious: as purchasing director at Colruyt, he was appreciated as hard but also open, correct and constructive.
Agecore does not call itself a purchasing group. The organisation makes agreements at a European level with the large multinationals about conditions on top of the agreements that the various retailers make with their suppliers in their respective markets. If the negotiations do not go according to plan, orders are sometimes stopped. In recent years Agecore has been in the news several times with boycott actions against big names such as AB InBev, Nestlé, Mars and PepsiCo. Only at the beginning of this year a conflict with Coca-Cola came to light. It was only in September that all trading partners reached an agreement.
