The Christmas catering season is won or lost in October. What Bilka and føtex learned when they took catering online, and the six decisions every grocery chain should make before the first pre-order arrives.
Ask a supermarket deli manager when Christmas catering starts and the answer is rarely “December”. In Denmark the first peak is St. Martin's Eve, 10 November. Company Christmas lunches fill late November and December, demand peaks on Christmas Eve, and the season ends with New Year's Eve. Orders for all of it start arriving in October. That is close to three months of demand, with four hard peaks, all produced by the same butcher, bakery and deli counters that also run the store's everyday trade.
When Bilka and føtex, part of Salling Group, decided to take their catering online with Sprinting Retail, the company behind FoodShop, the deadline was not a date in a project plan. It was a dinner. The first release had to be live in 12 weeks, in time to sell for St. Martin's Eve. It was.
One year after launch, with marketing spend increased alongside it, their catering business had grown by 50%. That number is the reason this article exists. The lessons behind it are not specific to Denmark, and most of them have to be acted on before the first Christmas order arrives.
Before the online shop, Bilka and føtex customers “in most cases had to go and order in our shops”. An order that needs a store visit is an order that gets placed late, because nobody makes a special trip in October for a meal in December.
Online, the order can be placed the moment the customer thinks of it, and that moment comes earlier than most chains expect. Company lunches are booked by office managers weeks ahead. Families settle Christmas Eve menus in November. A chain that publishes its Christmas range on 1 December has already lost the customers who planned on 15 November.
føtex does exactly this. On foetexudafhuset.dk the classic Christmas lunch can be picked up from 10 October, a full month before St. Martin's Eve and ten weeks before Christmas Eve.
The practical rule: publish the full Christmas range, with prices and pickup dates, at least four weeks before the first peak. For a season that opens on 10 November, that means mid-October. Today.
“Order by 20 December” is the most common Christmas rule in supermarket catering, and the least useful. A whole roast needs to be sourced. A layered dessert needs a day to set. A sandwich platter can be made the same morning. A single season cut-off is either too early for the platter, which loses sales, or too late for the roast, which loses sleep.
Write the rule where the constraint lives:
This is what it looks like on a live shop. The føtex classic Christmas lunch, as customers see it today: priced per cover, a minimum of six covers, ordered at least four days before pickup, and available from 10 October to 30 December.
Rules like these only work if the customer meets them at the moment of ordering. A platform that greys out the dates a product cannot be delivered never has to phone a customer to say no.
Every store has a ceiling on what its kitchen can produce in a day. Christmas does not raise the ceiling; it raises demand against it. The chains that cope are the ones whose ordering system knows the ceiling and fills the days before it, so that 22 and 23 December carry orders that would otherwise have crushed the 24th.
The arithmetic is the same as for New Year's Eve, which we worked through for a single store in The New Year's Eve Catering Capacity Problem. The Christmas difference is that the peaks repeat. Capacity per store, per day and per product category has to be set once, before the first order arrives, and then left to do its work for the whole season.
Before their platform, Bilka and føtex orders “were all paperbased, and the kitchens had to arrange orders according to delivery dates in physical pocket file folders”. It is worth reading that sentence twice, because it describes most supermarket catering in Europe today. The folder works in February. In December it is the reason a kitchen discovers at six in the morning what it promised for eleven.
The folder also hides the second problem the case names: ingredient stock. When orders live on paper, nobody can total tomorrow's duck, cream or rye bread until the morning shift adds them up by hand. When orders live in a system, the production list and the purchasing list are the same report, available the day the order is placed.
Bilka and føtex ended up with something they describe as much more than a web shop: “a comprehensive e-commerce solution … that also supports order management and production in our catering business.” At Christmas, that second half matters more than the first.
Christmas is when grocery chains spend most on marketing, and catering usually gets a line in the leaflet. The Bilka and føtex experience points to a better use of the money:
“We run campaigns that link to specific pages in the shop part of the solution, which has tremendously driven up sales.”
A campaign that ends on a catering homepage asks the customer to search. A campaign that ends on the Christmas duck menu for six, with tomorrow's earliest pickup already shown, asks them to pay. The same applies to seasonal menus themselves. Launching them fast was, in Bilka's words, part of the success:
“We can better tailor our menus to specialised and seasonal demands. A part of our success in our catering business comes from the ability to innovate and launch products fast.”
When the case was written, Bilka and føtex reported that about 50% of catering sales happened online in 2018, and 60%in the year that followed. Once customers can order online, they keep doing it. Every Christmas order that arrives through the shop is an order that did not need a counter assistant's time in the busiest week of the year, and that time goes back into production.
None of this is exotic. It is what Bilka and føtex needed in 12 weeks before a St. Martin's Eve, and what any grocery chain needs before its own first peak. The difference between a chain that has it and one that does not shows up every year, on the same few weeks.
Facts and quotes about Bilka, føtex and Salling Group are from the published Bilka and føtex customer story by Sprinting Retail, the company that develops FoodShop. Bilka, a chain of 18 hypermarkets, and føtex, a chain of 100 supermarkets, are part of Salling Group, Denmark's leading retailer. The figures refer to the period the case describes. The føtex product rules were read from the live shop in October 2026. Other lead times and examples are illustrative.
See the platform Bilka and føtex run their catering on, and how lead times, capacity and production lists would work for your stores.
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