Philippe Palazzi (Casino Group): “The boundaries between retail, restaurants, and hotels are blurring.”
A guest at Food Hotel Tech 2026, Philippe Palazzi, CEO of the Casino Group and Chairman of Monoprix and Naturalia, shared his vision of a market undergoing profound transformation. For him, restaurants, hotels, and convenience stores are no longer separate worlds but rather components of a single ecosystem serving a consumer who has become more mobile, more demanding, and more unpredictable.
This evolution is fundamentally reshaping business models and opening up new opportunities for collaboration between players in the hospitality and retail sectors.
Consumers no longer see boundaries.
For a long time, roles were clearly defined. The restaurant served meals, the hotel accommodated travelers, and the grocery store met everyday needs.
This logic is now a thing of the past.
According to Philippe Palazzi, consumers today naturally navigate between several options for getting food: restaurants, bakeries, local shops, delivery, or takeout. Their goal is no longer to choose a channel, but simply to find the solution best suited to their current needs.
“The boundaries between all our businesses are blurring,” he emphasizes.
This evolution is particularly visible in city centers, where restaurants, snack bars, services, and local shops now coexist within the same customer journey.
The rise of more fragmented consumption
Eating habits have changed profoundly.
Meals are less planned, schedules are more flexible, and decisions are often made at the last minute. Remote work, new family structures, and urban lifestyles have accelerated this transformation.
Consumers now seek food that is quick, high-quality, healthy, and accessible at any time of day.
This shift directly benefits local businesses, whose role is evolving. Historically conceived as convenience stores, they are gradually becoming key players in everyday dining.
Consumers have become hybrid, summarizes Philippe Palazzi.
Local businesses are becoming players in the hospitality industry.
This transformation also affects tourism.
In certain Parisian areas, nearly half of the revenue generated by some Casino Group stores comes from foreign bank cards.
To meet these new consumer habits, stores are developing services that go far beyond their traditional function: ready-to-eat meals, luggage storage, key handover for short-term rentals, and extended opening hours.
During the Paris Olympic Games, the group’s stores provided storage for more than 15,000 pieces of luggage.
For Philippe Palazzi, these services now make local businesses a natural partner for the hotel industry.
A grocery store open 7 days a week next to a hotel represents a real competitive advantage for the establishment.
Takeaway food becomes a strategic pillar
Faced with changing consumer habits, the Casino Group is accelerating its development in the takeaway food sector.
Monoprix is notably rolling out its “La Cantine” concept, which offers premium fast food with baristas and recipes developed in collaboration with chefs.
Franprix, for its part, is continuing the development of its “Oxygène” concept, combining cold food, hot snacks, and ready-to-eat meal solutions.
Naturalia is also investing in this market with an organic snack offering tailored to new consumer expectations.
The stated ambition is particularly strong: Philippe Palazzi believes that within ten years, takeaway food could represent 50% of the group’s stores’ revenue.
This projection illustrates the scale of the transformation currently underway in the food retail sector.
Towards a more collaborative food ecosystem
Beyond new concepts, Philippe Palazzi strongly believes that retail and hospitality players now share the same challenges.
Product quality, traceability, sustainability, customer experience, speed of service, and technological innovation: these issues are increasingly converging.
According to him, the challenge is no longer which player will capture market growth, but how each can contribute to meeting increasingly complex and fragmented consumer needs.
Feeding the French has become a collective mission.
This vision of a more open ecosystem, where retailers, restaurateurs, hoteliers, and snack food providers work together in a complementary fashion, is undoubtedly one of the key takeaways from this presentation.
As trends consumption patterns are evolving, traditional models are fading away to make room for a new form of hospitality, more hybrid, more flexible and more focused on the real needs of consumers.