Heinz brand enters new category with chilled juice drink

Heinz has launched a new brand called Heinz Sunshine. The product is a chilled fruit drink and comes in two different flavours : Forrest Fruit/Tomato and Citrus/Tomato. It is the first time the company has launched a fruit drink with the heinz brand name. The company already has much experience in this category in the Netherlands though. The company owns two major Dutch fruit beverage brands: Roosvicee and Karvan Cevitam.

Chilled fruit drinks is one of the fastest growing categories in Dutch retail and Heinz thinks that with Heinz Sunshine it can bring something new to the category. The fruit drinks contain tomatoes which are a natural source of lycopene.

The product comes in a cluster pack with three 150ml bottles. The advised unit price is EUR2.15.

Belgian retailer Colruyt opens first Dutch supermarket

Belgian retailer Colruyt has entered the Dutch market. The company opened a Bio-Planet organic supermarket in Eindhoven (Southern part of the Netherlands). The Bio-Planet is the first time Colruyt ventures into the Dutch market.

The Bio-Planet supermarket in Eindhoven has a product range of 5,000 different products and sells both food and non-food items. The Bio-Planet outlet has a lot of similarities with the well known Colruyt discount supermarkets. The Dried processed food items for instance are displayed in high metal shelves. All food items are organic and all non-food items are produced in an environmentally friendly way.

IKEA builds hotel in Delft

Furniture and furnishings retailer IKEA has started work on a hotel in the City of Delft. The hotel is a partnership between IKEA and hotel chain Golden Tulip. The hotel will be open to the public, but will be mainly used to house IKEA franchisers and employees.

IKEA has one of its main international training centers in Delft and this outlet is host to IKEA people from all over the world. Annually around 1,500 people come to Delft to be trained to improve the performance of their own IKEA outlet. IKEA Delft is the biggest IKEA store in the Netherlands and is currently being renovated to extend retail space even further.

IKEA Delft is the only Dutch store that is not part of the IKEA Nederland organisation, but is directly owned by the IKEA Systems BV (the international "parent" company).