Metro Inc. have been among the few businesses to do well during the pandemic.
Through technological investments such as the integration of electronic shelf labels in Metro stores, CEO Eric La Flèche has guided the grocery to the top.
In fact, Metro Inc. have been among the few businesses to do well during the pandemic. But their success has not come easily.
“In a market filled with strong and sophisticated competitors, La Flèche has guided Metro to a position of impressive strength and customer loyalty, doubling its asset base in the past five years, employing some 90,000 Canadians, and increasing its revenues to over $16 billion annually,” said John Wallace, chief executive of Caldwell Partners, founding partner of Canada’s Outstanding CEO of the Year.
“La Flèche’s passion for understanding Metro’s customers — for analyzing the markets and acting upon the insights — has transformed the very nature of the customer experience.”
During the pandemic, people still needed food supplies. Since restaurants were closed, travel restricted and more people were working from home, grocery have only gone up. Observing the increased demand from the community during this period, the industry adopted a lot of innovative strategies to boost its profitability. Initially slow to adopt e-commerce, the grocers are now all-in, accelerating their investments in technology and their growth projections. Adding in-store technologies such as self-checkouts and electronic shelf labels allowed Metro to have more dynamic results.
Today, thanks to those technological efforts, La Flèche was named Outstanding CEO of the Year in Canada for 2020.
