Thank you to CGI for having me at Insights22 in Helsinki. A great opportunity to share the Hospitality Digital (HD) story and talk about how HD creates real value for restaurateurs and Metro. Nice recording. Give it a look.
What is Hospitality Digital?
Hospitality Digital is Metro’s dedicated digital unit, founded in 2015 with one clear mission: digitize the entire value chain that restaurant owners need to master today. We have built DISH (dish.co), now one of the largest hospitality ecosystems in the world, connecting 250,000 restaurant owners across 16 markets with tools like online table reservations, pickup and delivery, website creation, and cloud-based POS systems. With a team of 400 people – 80% working remotely – we operate as a fully agile company, entirely in the cloud.
Innovation with Real Impact
From day one, Metro gave HD a single defining mandate: what you build must have an impact on the core business. No experiments for their own sake. HD was structured as an internal incubator. Separate from Metro’s processes, free to move fast, but accountable for results. And the results are measurable: digitized customers buy more frequently and in larger volumes from Metro stores. That direct and indirect value is what has justified the investment year after year and earned the trust of Metro’s shareholders and leadership.
Mobile First — Driven by Restaurateurs
The mobile-first strategy didn’t start with a slide deck. It came from our 200 test restaurants across Europe. One signal was consistent from the Nordics to Eastern Europe to the South: the younger generation of restaurateurs said, “I want to run my restaurant from my smartphone.” Table reservations, delivery orders, cloud-based cash register – all in one place. When the pandemic hit, what had seemed ambitious quickly became essential. CGI has been a key technology partner in making that vision scalable, stable, and secure across all 16 markets.
What Can Other Companies Learn from This?
Three things stand out from our journey:
- Accept that it’s a journey. You can’t plan an agile transformation in a spreadsheet. React to market needs, adapt continuously and don’t chase the big-bang launch that probably won’t happen anyway.
- Be prepared to put money on the table. Process-level innovation – especially in complex industries like hospitality – is rarely cheap. But the ROI is measurable if you define what impact looks like from day one.
- Trust your team. Build it, give it focus, and resist the urge to pile on 150 KPIs. A few sharp targets – improve NPS by 15 points, cut customer complaints on this one process – go a lot further than a metrics jungle.
The hospitality industry is evolving fast. Restaurants are becoming experience centers, diners expect seamless digital touchpoints, and the lines between wholesale, digital services, and food delivery are converging. At Metro, those three circles – stores, digital solutions, and food service delivery – are coming together. Hospitality Digital sits right at the intersection. That’s exactly where we want to be.
Photo: © CGI Inc.