Sligro Food Group strives to be a dependable, high-quality company achieving managed growth in all its activities and for the benefit of all its stakeholders.

Our objective is to achieve average growth in sales of around 10% each year, with around 4% attributable to organic growth and around 6% to growth through acquisitions. Our targets for organic growth assume annual inflation of approximately 2%. Growth through acquisitions is by its very nature less gradual than organic growth, particularly because the group focuses primarily on relatively large acquisitions. We strive to achieve a growth in profits that is on average at least equal to the increase in our sales so that we can offer shareholders attractive returns over the longer term. One of the ways in which we seek to be an attractive partner for our customers is by providing a high level of service at competitive prices. Our growth strategy also provides our staff with opportunities for personal development, while our suppliers have the chance to increase their product sales and also to introduce new product lines, sometimes in the form of a partnership.

Society as a whole benefits both from the increasing levels of employment and the resultant rise in tax revenues. We strive to ensure our activities represent examples of socially responsible entrepreneurship and to account for our performance. Sligro Food Group sells both directly and indirectly to the entire Dutch food and beverages market. We consistently offer an extremely wide range of food and related non-food product lines. As a supplier of food products we are very conscious of the importance of food safety and obviously fully support the requirement to comply with externally set quality standards. In order for us to be assured of sufficient purchasing power in the market, our food retail purchases are handled by the cooperative purchasing organisation Superunie, which has a 35% share of the Dutch supermarket sector. As Sligro Food Group is one of the largest players in the foodservice market, the group handles its own purchasing for these activities. The group operates in a fiercely competitive environment, in which the scope to translate cost increases into higher selling prices is limited. We continually strive, therefore, to increase the efficiency of our operations by ensuring that our distribution, communication and information systems, for example, are as effective as possible.

Companies within the group also work very closely together to maximise the benefits of internal synergy. Activities that are primarily customer-related take place largely in the individual business units, with everything being managed ‘behind the scenes’ at a centralised level. Achieving our objectives reinforces the basis for the independent position in the market that Sligro Food Group wishes to maintain into the longer-term future.