During 2025, Axfood has carried out one of its largest digital initiatives to date: a cloud-based store platform that enables more efficient ways of working and frees up more time for customer interaction across all of the Group’s stores.
More than 18,000 full-time and part-time store employees have gained new and more efficient ways of working through a new store platform for Axfood’s chains Willys, City Gross, Hemköp, Tempo, Snabbgross and Eurocash. The new platform is cloud-based and brings together all relevant apps and systems needed for daily store operations.
“The new platform brings functions together, simplifies ways of working, and is designed to streamline and support our employees both now and for future needs. This makes us faster, more flexible, and even better equipped for the future of retail” says Annika Zettermarck, Head of Development at Axfood IT.
A tool for the entire store’s daily operations
The new store platform functions as a control room for everything related to store flows, such as pricing and promotions, ordering, inventory management and stock balances. Where employees previously worked across several separate systems, everything is now gathered in one place.
The platform requires significantly less administration and frees up more time, allowing store employees to focus more on customer interaction.
“Freeing up time from administration in our stores is extremely important to us. It means time can instead be spent making our stores as attractive as possible and ensuring that our store employees have more time to meet customers and their needs. We have developed a platform that is easy to learn and easy to use correctly, which is crucial for maintaining efficient store operations with a large number of new users every year,” says Patrik Strandberg, CIO at Willys.
Flexible for the Future
The platform has been developed for both Axfood-owned and retailer-owned stores, making it easy for independent retailers to join the Group.
“Within Axfood, we aim to give our retailers the best possible conditions to run successful stores, and with the new store platform we have enabled adaptations for all our retailers—such as the ability to tailor their in-store assortment with a higher share of local products. This is an important perspective that strengthens our business,” says Johan Dahl, Head of Strategy and Business Development at the Hemköp chain.
The platform has been developed together with the supplier Extenda Retail in a cloud-based and standardized technical environment. This enables updates to be carried out centrally and continuously, with high quality and at a significantly faster pace than before.
Read more about the technical platform at Extenda Retail. News - Extenda Retail
