Metro AG Bets Big on Wholesale 3.0: Can a Cash-and-Carry Veteran Win the New Foodservice Race?

The wholesale giant trying to reinvent itself

Metro AG is not the kind of company that usually grabs headlines in the way Big Tech or flashy consumer brands do. It runs cash-and-carry warehouses, delivers pallets of food, and supplies restaurateurs and small retailers with the unglamorous basics of doing business. Yet the transformation underway at Metro AG is one of the more consequential digital pivots in European retail: a legacy wholesaler trying to become the operating system for the foodservice industry.

In a world where independent restaurants are squeezed by inflation, staff shortages, and platform fees from delivery apps, Metro AG pitches itself as the behind-the-scenes enabler. Its core problem statement is simple: professional customers need predictable prices, reliable product availability, and an increasingly digital way to order, manage, and optimize their supplies. Metro AG wants to be the one-stop wholesale solution that does all of that at scale.

That means Metro AG today is less about cavernous warehouses and more about omnichannel ordering, data-driven assortment management, and high-frequency logistics designed for hotels, restaurants, and catering (HoReCa) businesses. The company’s push into wholesale 3.0 — blending physical stores, last?mile delivery, and a growing suite of digital tools — is what now defines Metro AG as a product and platform, not just an old-line retailer.

Get all details on Metro AG here

Inside the Flagship: Metro AG

At its core, Metro AG is a B2B wholesale ecosystem built around three pillars: large-format cash-and-carry stores, foodservice delivery, and a digital marketplace that increasingly glues everything together. Rather than chasing end consumers, Metro AG focuses on professional buyers — the chefs, hoteliers, caterers, and small shop owners who buy in bulk and care about consistency, margin, and service.

Metro AG’s flagship proposition to this audience can be broken down into several key features and capabilities.

1. HoReCa-first product assortment and own brands

Metro AG has spent years repositioning its assortment away from classic retail and toward professional kitchens. That means a deep, food-led catalog that includes fresh, chilled, frozen, dry, and non-food categories tailored to restaurant and hotel operations.

A central piece of that strategy is its portfolio of own brands, developed specifically with professional use in mind. These private labels aim to undercut branded goods on price while maintaining quality that chefs can trust across large volumes and repeated orders. For restaurateurs facing razor-thin margins and volatile input prices, Metro AG’s own brands become a key lever for predictable cost and consistent quality.

2. Omnichannel ordering: store, delivery, and digital marketplace

The traditional Metro AG experience started with the cash-and-carry store: business customers driving in, loading up trolleys, and leaving with vanfuls of goods. That model still exists, but the product that really matters now is the omnichannel layer on top.

Metro AG has built out a multichannel platform where professional buyers can:

• Browse and order via online shop or dedicated apps
• Choose between in-store pickup or direct delivery
• Access tailored pricing, promotions, and order histories linked to their business accounts

The online wholesale shop and its connected tools effectively turn Metro AG into a digital marketplace for B2B supplies. Customers can manage weekly replenishment, track deliveries, and plan purchases without ever pushing a trolley through a warehouse aisle.

3. Foodservice delivery as a core product

Delivery is no longer an add-on; it is central to Metro AG’s competitive play. The company has been scaling its foodservice delivery operations across Europe and beyond, using its network of stores and distribution platforms as nodes in a dense logistics web. For restaurants that cannot afford to tie up staff time in warehouse visits, scheduled and on-demand delivery is the value that matters most.

Over time, Metro AG’s delivery capabilities have evolved from truck routes to a more data-driven service. By analyzing order frequency, basket composition, and seasonality, the company can optimize inventory positioning and route planning, reducing stockouts and shortening lead times for professional customers.

4. Digital tools and data as a service layer

Where Metro AG gets particularly interesting as a product is at the software layer. Beyond simply offering an online order form, the company has been investing in digital solutions tailored to professional foodservice operations. While the portfolio varies by market, the overarching direction is clear:

• Order management and recurring basket templates for predictable replenishment
• Budget and cost control tools integrated with purchasing accounts
• Data insights on product mix, prices, and consumption patterns

Over time, this positions Metro AG less as a wholesaler and more as a workflow partner. The more customer data flows through Metro AG’s systems, the easier it becomes to cross-sell services, optimize assortment, and deepen switching costs. For independent restaurant owners who often lack sophisticated back-office tools, this kind of integrated purchasing and analytics experience can be a meaningful differentiator.

5. Sustainability and sourcing transparency

Sustainability is no longer a PR checkbox in foodservice; it is increasingly a buying criterion for hotels, caterers, and restaurants that must answer to their own guests. Metro AG has been building out programs around responsible sourcing, food waste reduction, and more sustainable packaging. Crucially, the wholesale product becomes not just the goods on the pallet, but the data that accompanies them: origin information, certifications, and compliance documentation that professional buyers can pass on in their own marketing and regulatory reporting.

By embedding sustainability attributes into its product catalogs and digital tools, Metro AG tries to turn a regulatory headache for its customers into a manageable, data-supported process.

Market Rivals: Metro Aktie vs. The Competition

Metro AG operates in a brutally competitive space. Cash-and-carry and foodservice wholesale are under pressure from global retail giants, specialized distributors, and increasingly from online-first B2B marketplaces. To understand how Metro AG’s product proposition stacks up, it helps to look at a few key rivals and their competing offerings.

Compared directly to Costco Business Center (Costco Wholesale)

In North America, Costco’s Business Center format is a reference point for professional wholesale buyers. Like Metro AG, Costco Business Center targets restaurants, convenience stores, and offices with bulk products, foodservice packaging, and equipment.

The strengths of Costco Business Center include:

• Extremely aggressive pricing powered by global scale and membership economics
• Highly efficient warehouse operations and limited-SKU philosophy
• A strong reputation for quality and value that carries over from Costco’s consumer brand

But compared directly to Costco Business Center, Metro AG has a few distinct advantages in its core markets:

• Stronger localization of assortment for European and emerging-market cuisines
• A deeper focus on HoReCa operators rather than mixed B2B/B2C traffic
• More developed digital ordering and foodservice delivery capabilities in many of its territories

Where Costco Business Center still leans heavily on physical store visits in most markets, Metro AG’s hybrid of store plus delivery plus digital tools is better aligned with urban, time-constrained European restaurateurs.

Compared directly to Sysco’s foodservice distribution

On the pure foodservice distribution side, Sysco is the global benchmark. Sysco’s core product is its broadline distribution network in North America and select international markets: thousands of SKUs of food, beverage, and non-food supplies delivered directly to restaurant back doors on tight schedules.

Sysco’s strengths include:

• Deep penetration of the independent restaurant market in the United States
• Highly optimized delivery logistics and cold chain management
• Increasingly sophisticated digital ordering and menu management tools

Compared directly to Sysco’s foodservice product, Metro AG is more of a hybrid between a self-service warehouse model and a distribution platform. That means:

• Metro AG offers both walk-in wholesale and delivery, giving customers more flexibility
• Its store network doubles as a physical showroom and immediate pickup option
• Metro AG is structurally more diversified geographically than Sysco’s North America-heavy footprint

However, Sysco still leads in depth of integration with customer kitchens in its home market — from menu engineering to just-in-time delivery scheduling. Metro AG’s challenge is to push its digital and advisory layer further so that its relationship with restaurants becomes as embedded and indispensable as Sysco’s is in the U.S.

Compared directly to Amazon Business

Then there is the tech-native challenger: Amazon Business. While not purely a foodservice player, Amazon Business is increasingly a default B2B procurement channel for offices, small retailers, and even some restaurant and hospitality operators.

Amazon Business’s product is built around:

• A vast marketplace of third-party sellers with highly competitive pricing
• Prime-like delivery expectations and transparent shipping windows
• Procurement features such as approval workflows and multi-user business accounts

In a direct comparison, Amazon Business outperforms most traditional wholesalers on breadth of assortment and convenience for non-perishable categories. But Metro AG has a critical edge in the core of its value proposition: controlled cold chain, fresh and ultra-fresh products, and deep HoReCa-specific assortments that are not easily replicated by a generalist marketplace.

Metro AG also has an advantage in regulatory and safety compliance for food in many markets, where end-to-end control of sourcing, storage, and transport matters. While Amazon Business may ship everything from office supplies to catering gear, it is not yet the default supplier for fresh seafood or chilled meat in professional kitchens at scale.

The Competitive Edge: Why it Wins

Metro AG does not win on every metric. It is not the cheapest wholesaler in every category, nor the most technologically advanced digital marketplace globally. Its edge lies in the way it stacks physical infrastructure, digital tools, and a sharply defined HoReCa focus into a coherent, defensible B2B product.

1. A purpose-built ecosystem for independent foodservice

Unlike some rivals that straddle consumer and business segments, Metro AG’s ecosystem is tightly tuned to professional needs. Everything from store layout to pack sizes, from private-label specs to credit terms, is designed for businesses that buy frequently and in volume.

This focus translates into a user experience that feels made for restaurateurs rather than retrofitted from consumer retail. Business customers access tailored pricing, volume incentives, and delivery options that reflect how professional kitchens actually operate.

2. Hybrid model as a structural advantage

The combination of cash-and-carry stores, regional distribution centers, and digital ordering platforms gives Metro AG a hybrid operating model that is hard to copy quickly. Pure warehouse clubs like Costco Business Center lack the same delivery intensity in many markets; pure distributors like Sysco lack the cash-and-carry footprint; online marketplaces like Amazon Business lack controlled cold chain at scale.

Metro AG can flex this hybrid model dynamically. In dense urban areas, it can emphasize delivery and online ordering. In more price-sensitive or logistics-challenged regions, the cash-and-carry format can dominate. Over time, this flexibility is a hedge against shifts in how professional buyers prefer to procure their goods.

3. Data and digitalization as a flywheel

The strategic upside for Metro AG lies in data. Every digital order, every delivery, every seasonal shift in assortment adds to a data trove that can improve forecasting, minimize waste, and sharpen pricing. As more independent restaurants adopt digital ordering — often for the first time — Metro AG is well positioned to become the default platform through which a large share of their purchasing data flows.

Compared to legacy wholesaling, where customer insight was limited to what store managers observed on the floor, this data layer is transformative. It allows Metro AG to target its marketing, refine its private-label development, and launch new services (such as menu cost tools or sustainability dashboards) that plug directly into existing customer behavior.

4. Local roots with international scale

Metro AG operates across a wide range of markets in Europe and beyond, from Germany and Eastern Europe to selected countries in Asia. This gives it global buying power but also forces it to localize assortments and pricing structures. The result is a product that blends scale with localism: standardized back-end systems with regionally tuned front-ends.

That positioning matters against global rivals that sometimes take a one-size-fits-all approach. For example, compared directly to Amazon Business, which leans heavily on generic marketplace logic, Metro AG’s locally curated fresh assortments and region-specific hospitality ranges feel far more aligned with how restaurants actually cook and serve.

5. Embedded sustainability and compliance

Regulation is tightening around food safety, traceability, and environmental impact. Metro AG’s integrated model — owning the relationship with suppliers, controlling logistics, and operating both stores and delivery — gives it the ability to embed compliance and sustainability into the product itself. That means providing documentation, certifications, and origin data at scale, which restaurateurs can reuse in their own reporting and branding.

This goes beyond nice-to-have optics. For many hotel chains and contract caterers, a supplier’s ability to deliver verifiable sustainability data is now a prerequisite for long-term contracts. Metro AG’s structural setup makes it easier to meet those requirements than marketplace-only competitors that have less control over the supply chain.

Impact on Valuation and Stock

Metro Aktie (ISIN: DE000BFB0019), the listed share of Metro AG, is the financial mirror of this strategic shift. As of the latest available market data checked via multiple financial sources, Metro Aktie reflects a company in mid-transformation: exiting non-core markets, doubling down on wholesale, and investing heavily in digital infrastructure and delivery capacity.

Because real-time stock prices move continuously and are subject to trading hours and market liquidity, the most reliable picture for long-term analysis remains the last closing price and recent performance trends. At the time of analysis, external financial data providers indicate that Metro Aktie is trading in a range that implies modest expectations from the market — a mix of cautious optimism about its wholesale focus and lingering skepticism after years of restructuring.

How does the Metro AG product story feed into the share price narrative?

1. Growth driver: foodservice and digital penetration

The main growth vector that equity analysts track is Metro AG’s penetration of the independent HoReCa segment, especially via delivery and digital channels. Every percentage point of sales that migrates from walk-in, price-only relationships to logged-in, digital, and delivery-driven accounts increases the quality and predictability of revenue.

Investors tend to reward that kind of shift, because digitally mediated relationships are stickier, more data-rich, and easier to monetize over time with value-added services. To the extent that Metro AG can demonstrate rising online order share, growing delivery density, and increasing usage of digital tools, Metro Aktie stands to benefit from a rerating as a platform-style wholesaler rather than a low-margin, asset-heavy retailer.

2. Margin dynamics: own brands and efficiency

Another lever that directly links product to stock performance is margin. Metro AG’s push into own brands is not just about customer loyalty; it is also about capturing a greater share of the value chain. Higher penetration of private labels with stable quality can expand gross margin, especially when combined with improved demand forecasting powered by its digital platforms.

On the cost side, investment in route optimization, warehouse automation, and smarter inventory management all show up over time in operating margin improvement. The more Metro AG can use its hybrid model and data layer to reduce waste, consolidate loads, and sharpen procurement, the stronger the argument for sustainable margin expansion — and the more support Metro Aktie receives from fundamentals rather than just sentiment.

3. Risk factors: execution and competitive pressure

The flip side is that execution risk remains high. Building a full-stack, digitally enabled wholesale platform while keeping day-to-day operations stable is complex and capital-intensive. Any missteps — from IT rollouts to supply chain disruptions — hit both customers and investors quickly.

Intense competition from rivals such as regional foodservice distributors, global warehouse clubs, and tech-native marketplaces also caps pricing power in many categories. For shareholders, the key question is whether Metro AG can lean far enough into value-added services, digital lock-in, and private-label differentiation to offset those competitive pressures.

Ultimately, Metro Aktie is a leveraged bet on whether Metro AG can complete its pivot: from a traditional cash-and-carry operator to a resilient, data-driven wholesale platform specifically tuned to the needs of modern hospitality and foodservice businesses. If that product vision continues to gain traction in the field — measured in customer retention, digital adoption, and profitable growth — the stock has a clear path to being seen less as a turnaround story and more as a structural winner in B2B food distribution.