Ingrid Maes is the entrepreneur at the helm of W23 Global as CEO and Chief Investment Officer. Ingrid brings 25+ years of experience in retail, data, customer loyalty, digital and investment, while also heading up Australian grocery leader Woolworths’ innovation fund, W23 Australia.
What’s the purpose of W23 Global?
W23 Global is a worldwide innovation partnership between five leading grocery retailers – Ahold Delhaize, Tesco, Empire Group (owner of Sobeys supermarkets), Shoprite and Woolworths Group – jointly investing in start-ups to accelerate retail transformation and deliver sustainability ambitions.
What’s the strategic rationale behind the alliance?
Together, W23 Global partners serve nearly 160m customers, have around 19,000 stores and employ over 1.2m people across the U.S., Canada, U.K., Europe, Africa and Australia.
The collaboration enables us to achieve better and faster outcomes at lower costs, creating an unmatched competitive edge: Partners get superior access to the best innovations worldwide; Partners can learn from each other and accelerate innovation adoption; W23 Global creates a platform to jointly foster new innovations.
How is W23 Global complementing its partners’ continuing direct innovation and investment strategies?
W23 Global is focused on investing in globally scalable start-ups where collaboration delivers better outcomes for partners. It deliberately steers clear of investing in start-ups with a local approach, such as a regional last-mile delivery business. Moreover, W23 Global does not acquire controlling stakes, which is typically the domain of M&A teams.
How do you reflect on the first couple of months of W23 Global, following the fund’s launch?
The focus so far has been on connecting with the teams and understanding more about each partner’s strategies and priorities. I’ve really enjoyed meeting the key innovators across our partners and Ahold Delhaize, diving deeper into their unique strategies and priorities, and learning how W23 Global can support their innovation journeys.
Looking forward, could you name some key opportunities for 2025?
The future holds immense potential, and I look forward to continuing to collaborate closely with Ahold Delhaize’s innovators and support them in delivering their strategies. We’ll be scanning the global horizon for exciting innovations across various areas, such as personalization, adaptive retail, social commerce, retail media, robotics and automation, agentic AI, emissions reduction, waste management, circular commerce, regenerative agriculture, nature and alternative proteins. And I’m excited to share these innovations with Ahold Delhaize and invest in the best of them.
Ahold Delhaize, a Partner in the W23 Global VC Fund
Innovation plays a crucial role in shaping the future of the ever-evolving grocery retail sector. As such, one of the key priorities of Ahold Delhaize’s Growing Together strategy is driving customer innovation. Collaborating and partnering with different organizations enable innovation – at speed and at scale. In 2024, Ahold Delhaize announced that it had joined forces with four other leading grocery retailers to establish a collaborative venture capital (VC) fund, W23 Global. This pioneering VC fund aims to drive transformative growth through targeted investments.
