French supermarket group Casino will take its first steps in Belgium, after having opened a first Franprix convenience store in Brussels. It will be a trial to test the Belgian waters.
“Only a trial”
“It is only a trial and not the precursor of an expansion outside of the French market”, a Casino spokesperson told French LSA. Franprix is mostly located in and around Paris, where it has 750 locations. Closer to Belgium, it has two convenience stores in Lille.
It will not be as easy to move to Belgium, because Franprix has encountered several problems already. It struggled to obtain permits and it was very time-consuming to provide two languages on its packaging. It had to do so in order to launch in Brussels, otherwise it would have breached the local language legislation.
