The lion is out of its cage

Sophie and Sven took over the shop in Heusden in 2018: a supermarket with a butcher’s counter that had had a reputation for thirty years, a staffed charcuterie counter and its own kitchen. In November 2020 we announced a webshop was coming; by the end of 2021 it was online. That was mid-pandemic: the new year banner wished everyone “a joyful, happy and virus-free 2022”.

Back then the shop was still called AD Delhaize. Since the rebranding it’s simply Delhaize Heusden, although the domain name stayed as it was.

This isn’t a shop for your weekly trolley. You order party platters, desserts, breakfast baskets and gift vouchers, all prepared in the shop itself. Every product says whether it serves at least two, what’s on it and what it costs. Some things you can’t buy online at all: the lobster belle vue is ordered at the counter, and the site says so.

There’s no home delivery. You collect, and that’s the tricky part: a shop can’t have twenty platters ready at eleven sharp. So the shop builds half-hour slots itself, based on that day’s opening hours. Closing days and exceptions — public holidays, Christmas Eve until five — are filled in by the shop. The slots follow along.

And if someone beats you to the last one while you’re ordering, the checkout catches it right before payment: “Oh no! While you were ordering, someone was quicker than you…” Better than promising a platter that isn’t there.

Behind the scenes they run everything themselves: products with a promo price you switch on and off, the right VAT rate per product (6, 21 or 0 percent), variants with their own prices, and stock that can be unlimited, sold out or in-store only. A product can even be unavailable on certain weekdays — the kitchen doesn’t make everything every day.

Orders get their own number per year, with customer details, pickup slot, payment status and the confirmation mail that went out. The same site also carries the recipes, the news and the job openings with an application form.

iPads in the aisles let customers reserve their platter on the spot, at a discount. That discount mode is switched on with a parameter in the address: ?sven=supermodus. Named after the owner, naturally.

Every product also got its own QR code, ready to print on a poster or a flyer. Scanning it dropped the product straight into the basket. That’s how the shop taught its customers to use the webshop — while they were standing between the shelves.

In February 2024 Sophie and Sven took over a second shop, near the rowing course in Ghent. Twice the size, with a kitchen of its own. It got the same webshop: its own products, its own opening hours, its own emails, the same engine underneath.

One detail gave the family ties away for a while: payments for Watersport came in through the Heusden site. In September 2026 Watersport got its own payment connection. Cable neatly cut.

Delhaize has a lion. That lion got a new mood every season: sunglasses for summer, bunny ears at Easter, lipstick for Valentine’s, a mask for carnival. It’s the kind of detail that makes a supermarket site feel human — and the kind of thing a client wants to change without having to call anyone.

In the summer of 2026 we moved both sites from Kirby 3 to Kirby 5, replaced the old plugins, protected the forms against spam in five layers, and gave everything a refresh while we were at it: the shop now comes first, the filter bar sticks while you scroll, and the basket and the order confirmation have been redrawn.

Because a webshop is not a project that gets finished. It’s a shop. It has to open every day.