Case shape

VHC

Channel Process Strategy
Vhc
100%
Effort

Client

VHC

Sector

Food

IMO

Strategy
Process
Channel

Young man with curly hair and mustache wearing white shirt standing on a city street.
Facing the same gap?

Lars Ramler
Digital Strategy Consultant

[email protected]

The brand

VHC (Vereenigde Hollandsche Compagnie) is a partnership of five Dutch foodservice wholesalers, ActiFood, Combigro Groep, VHC Jongens, VHC Kreko and VHC van der Star, that together supply the Dutch hospitality sector: restaurants, cafés, caterers and every other out-of-home business that needs food and non-food products delivered reliably, day after day.

What sets VHC apart isn’t the product. It’s the relationship. Over 90 of VHC’s own drivers show up at customers’ back doors every single day. Specialists, not a call centre, help chefs choose wine, fish and fresh produce at a level most suppliers can’t match. The result: customers stay for 15 years on average, and 98% of the leads that reach VHC become customers.

The challenge

VHC already wins on product and on relationship, the moment a prospect becomes a customer. The gap sits earlier: five separate regional labels, each with its own fragmented online presence, no shared brand story and no centralised funnel to catch a hospitality entrepreneur while they’re still comparing suppliers. Search for a foodservice wholesaler in the Netherlands and you’ll find Sligro, Bidfood and Hanos: years of investment in SEA, content and their own ordering platforms, dominating both the sponsored and organic results, while VHC stays invisible during exactly the phase that decides who gets the call. If you’re not visible while someone is still orienting, you never reach the quote stage, no matter how strong the relationship would have been.

Full focus is on getting the foundation right first.

Our approach
  • One brand, one story.
    Five regional labels are becoming one shared brand story under VHC. Before any media runs, we’re building the content structure that carries that story consistently, so paid media has something real to run on instead of five inconsistent voices competing with each other.
  • Touch, Tell, Sell.
    We’re building the customer journey in three deliberate steps. Touch reaches hospitality entrepreneurs who aren’t actively looking yet, out-of-market, through Meta. Tell shows them why VHC isn’t just another supplier: the drivers, the specialists, the 15-year relationships. Sell captures the moment someone is ready to compare and request a quote, in-market, through Google Search.
  • Centralised foundation.
    One vhc.nl becomes the central hub that routes every visitor to the right label, backed by one CRM view across all five brands instead of five disconnected customer records.
  • Research first, always.
    Nothing goes live on a hunch. Every piece of creative follows the same order: research, then creative, then media, then feedback.

Case in progress

VHC and CroudX are in the foundation phase together. This page will grow into a full case once the results are in.

Interested in more cases? Explore all our work.

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