A personal chef thanks to Carrefour
What if your next meal was prepared in your own home… by a chef booked through Carrefour? That is exactly the concept currently being developed by Carrefour Belgium. Revealed exclusively by Arnaud Lesne on The Retail Influencer, the new service could launch before the end of the year and represents another step in Carrefour's service-driven strategy.
The idea is straightforward: go far beyond simply selling food products. After expanding quick commerce, click & collect and home delivery, Carrefour now wants to accompany customers all the way to the moment their groceries become a meal.
From the store... to the dinner table
The concept is built around a matching platform. Through a mobile application, customers will be able to select an available chef in their area, choose the type of cuisine they would like, and book a date and time.
The chef will then purchase the ingredients at Carrefour, prepare the meal in the customer's home, serve the guests and leave once the dining experience is complete.
For Arnaud Lesne, the ambition is clear: extend the promise of Act For Food by making everyday life even easier for customers.
"We are already able to deliver high-quality products quickly. Now we want to go one step further and help our customers cook them."
Three types of chefs
The platform is not exclusively targeting Michelin-starred chefs. Carrefour envisions a community made up of three different profiles:
- Hospitality students looking to gain practical experience.
- Passionate home cooks eager to share their culinary skills.
- Professional chefs looking for additional income.
Each chef will create a personal profile, present their culinary specialties and receive customer ratings, following a model similar to ride-hailing or booking platforms.
Before joining the platform, however, candidates will be evaluated by Carrefour through tasting sessions involving consumers to ensure a consistent minimum quality standard.
A service designed to be accessible
Unlike the often exclusive image associated with private chefs, Carrefour wants to make the concept accessible to a much broader audience.
The retailer aims to price the service similarly to other everyday services such as babysitting or domestic assistance. Customers could therefore book a chef for a dinner with friends, a birthday celebration, a family gathering or simply as a personal treat.
Pricing will naturally depend on the selected profile, whether a student, an enthusiastic amateur or a professional chef.
Another step in Carrefour's service strategy
Over the past few years, Carrefour Belgium has significantly expanded its Act For Food strategy through improvements to its food offering, the development of more responsible products, environmental initiatives, faster delivery solutions and quick commerce.
This new service follows the same logic: moving beyond selling groceries to building a complete ecosystem of food-related services.
More broadly, Carrefour is looking to create additional value and strengthen customer relationships by entering an entirely new territory: home meal preparation.
A project still under development
The service is currently being developed. The application is nearing completion, while several operational details are still being finalized. Carrefour nevertheless hopes to launch the concept before the end of the year.
If successful, it would represent a highly original first in food retailing and further illustrate a broader transformation taking place across the industry: retailers are no longer simply selling products—they are increasingly building services that support consumers well beyond the supermarket shelves.
My 20/CENT
Beyond the innovation itself, this initiative perfectly illustrates how the role of retailers is evolving. For decades, retailers competed through their assortment, pricing or store formats. Today, the real competitive battlefield is increasingly shifting towards services.
With Carrefour Chef, the objective is not simply to sell more ingredients. Carrefour is trying to become a bigger part of its customers' daily lives by addressing a very concrete need: saving time while still enjoying a quality meal, without making the experience exclusive or expensive.
Compared with traditional meal kits, this concept goes several steps further. Meal kits certainly appeal to many consumers, but they also have clear limitations. They are often more expensive than buying the same ingredients through regular grocery shopping, portions do not always fit every household, recipes tend to be standardized and, above all, customers still have to cook everything themselves.
Carrefour Chef offers a completely different value proposition. Instead of merely simplifying grocery shopping, it delivers an almost turnkey solution, with a chef preparing the meal directly in the customer's home. The focus shifts from selling products to delivering a complete service experience, while remaining financially accessible.
This strategy reflects a broader international trend. Retailers are gradually transforming themselves into service platforms. Fast delivery, healthcare, financial services, mobility, repair services, second-hand offerings... home meal preparation could well become another pillar of this expanding ecosystem.
The remaining question is whether consumers will embrace this new habit. If they do, Carrefour could open a completely new chapter for food retail. Tomorrow, the value of a retailer may no longer be measured solely by the products it sells, but also by the services and experiences it creates around those products.
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