Carrefour is named after a crossroads and invented Europe's hypermarket
Carrefour means crossroads, and that is exactly where its first shop stood, in suburban Annecy in 1960. Three years later the company put a supermarket and a department store under one roof near Paris, opening Europe's first hypermarket. Today the group runs some 14,000 stores in 40 countries.
Marcel Fournier and the brothers Denis and Jacques Defforey set up the group in 1959, after attending American seminars given by Bernardo Trujillo. The first hypermarket opened on 15 June 1963 at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois. Expansion abroad began with Belgium in 1969 and spread to other continents during the 1970s. In 1999 a share swap merged Carrefour with Promodès, whose Normandy headquarters near Caen still serves as a second head office.
At home the formats have multiplied. France has more than 230 hypermarkets, some with 23,000 square metres of selling space, over a thousand Carrefour Market supermarkets and more than 2,000 small City, Contact and Express shops, plus a cash-and-carry chain and a supply business for independent grocers. Soft discount stores under the Supeco name arrived in 2019. Not every venture worked: an ambitious Russian push was shelved in 2009 after a single Moscow megastore.
Africa has become a growth story. Partner group CFAO opened the first hypermarket in Abidjan in 2015, and Kenya, where Carrefour arrived in 2016, now has 28 outlets, many in spaces left empty by the collapse of local chains Nakumatt and Uchumi. In Uganda it took over six stores vacated by South Africa's Shoprite in 2021, and an Ethiopian franchise is due to start in 2026.
Alexandre Bompard became chairman and chief executive in 2017 and set out a plan to cut food waste, grow organic lines and invest two billion euros a year. The group, now the seventh-largest retailer in the world by revenue and based in Massy, gained a new second-largest shareholder in November 2025, when the Saadé family of shipping group CMA CGM took a 4 per cent stake.
Source: Carrefour
