Stéphane Ronse

Stéphane Ronse's story is built around a single word he returns to again and again: naivety. Across all three interviews he insists that not knowing how hard something would be is precisely what let him attempt it. He compares founding Foodbag to climbing a mountain shrouded in fog: "Het is precies de Mount Everest dat je moet beklimmen, maar op het moment dat je begint aan uw beklimming is die berg in een grote mistwolk gehuld en ge ziet niet hoe hoog dat je moet, anders zou je er nooit aan beginnen" ². He makes the same point almost verbatim with the Himalaya image in ³, and generalizes it into a thesis about entrepreneurship itself: "Ik denk dat dat net de sterkte is van veel ondernemers, om in een bepaalde naïviteit te beginnen ondernemen, en daarmee ook disruptief te zijn in een bepaalde sector" ³. This is not nostalgia for him but a hard-edged, almost uncomfortable conclusion: asked whether he'd do it again knowing what he knows now, he is unambiguous — "Als mensen mij vragen zou je het opnieuw doen met de kennis die je nu heb, dan zeg ik resoluut nee" ², and elsewhere, "Mocht ik toen de kennis gehad hebben die ik nu heb, dan denk ik dat ik dat parcours gewoon niet zou aangevat zijn" ¹. He pairs this with a repeated warning that entrepreneurship is romanticized from the outside: "Ondernemerschap ziet er altijd rooskleurig uit van de buitenkant, langs de binnenkant is dat niet altijd zo" ².

Structurally, his lean, bootstrapped path is the second recurring theme. Foodbag started on almost nothing — "Ik had misschien €200 paar centen op een bankrekening staan" ¹, or in another telling €2,300 in savings ³ — and he frames this scarcity as a feature, not a bug. Because customer payments landed before supplier invoices came due, and digital ads let him experiment cheaply, the business model itself supported bootstrapping ¹. He explicitly contrasts this continuous, forced transformation against raising big capital and doing everything "right in one go," concluding the grinding, iterative path (the box-assembly process changed some seven times in ten years) was actually the better trajectory ². He calls himself "een gierige West-Vlaming die elke euro op de dag van vandaag nog altijd probeert om te draaien" ², and this frugality is tied to a broader claim: reaching break-even before taking outside money strengthened his negotiating position and kept him choosing strategic rather than purely financial investors ². He is pointed about what happens when founders skip this discipline: a big capital injection is "Zeer gevaarlijk moment. Dat is vaak het moment waarop het fout ziet lopen" ², because companies over-hire senior management and open the marketing taps prematurely.

A third throughline is deliberate localization as a competitive moat. Where HelloFresh and Marley Spoon pushed exotic, international recipes, Ronse built Foodbag around recognizable Belgian dishes and local products, believing customers churn quickly if a weekly box is full of quinoa and bulgur ¹². He frames this not just as taste preference but as strategy: food is geographically bound by ingredient sourcing, recipe habits, and quality perception, which he sees as structural protection against foreign entrants ². The ambition behind the Smartmat merger was explicitly nationalist in a commercial sense — "Eigenlijk willen we die freshfood e-commerce markt, hoe naïef dat dat ook is, voor een groot stuk in Belgische handen houden. Dat is eigenlijk onze droom" ³ — and he'd rather hold a modest share of a large, defended market than dominate a small one: "Liever een klein stuk van een grote taart dan een groot stuk van een kleine taart" ³.

On validation and product conviction, Ronse repeatedly returns to an early moment that reshaped his thinking: when friends and family didn't buy in the first week but strangers did, he reframed the disappointment as the strongest possible signal. "Ik zag daar geen enkele vriend of familielid in terug... onmiddellijk had ik de reflexe van: misschien is dat wel een goed teken, dat mensen uw product kopen omdat ze erin geloven en niet omdat ze u willen steunen" ³. This experience underlies his broader position on retention: repeat purchase must never be manufactured through subscription tricks but earned through product quality alone — "De kracht van herhaalkoop moet komen uit uw product. Mensen moeten zodanig overtuigd zijn van uw product en vandaar moet die kracht van die herhaalankoop komen" ¹.

Ronse is equally clear-eyed about organizational discipline and self-knowledge as the company scaled. He preaches staying in "Day One modus," warning that once an organization slips into "Day Two," faster competitors will overtake it ¹³. He advocates identifying a small number of crucial KPIs and tracking them weekly, and insists founders should know precisely which volume thresholds should trigger which investments rather than professionalizing prematurely ¹. He also practices what he calls "schoenmaker blijf bij je leest" — recognizing what you're bad at (in his case, food photography) and handing it to specialists rather than doing everything yourself ¹². This same rational detachment extends to how he thinks about ownership: quoting advice from a mentor, he treats the company as a lever rather than a child — "Stefan, stopt me naar uw bedrijf te kijken als zijnde uw kind, want dat is het niet" ³ — which he says made it easier to accept Colruyt Group's entry and, eventually, his own exit from the CEO role once the organization needed a manager's skillset rather than a founder's instinct.

Finally, Ronse's relationship building and merger philosophy repeat across sources as deliberate, almost countercultural advice: build informal, open relationships with competitors long before any deal is likely, because "you never know what will happen" ². This wasn't opportunism after the fact — those relationships with Smartmat and 15gram directly enabled both the merger and the acquisition years later ²³. He frames the Smartmat merger with a formula he repeats nearly identically across interviews — "Je moet zorgen dat 1 + 1 niet twee is maar drie is als je aan zoiets denkt" ¹ — and credits the resulting scale and shared cooled-logistics network with allowing Foodbag to survive COVID, when volumes tripled in two weeks: "We zijn op twee weken tijd verdrievoudigd in volumes" ². His broader civic conclusion, stated plainly, is not that everyone should start a company but that everyone should build the mindset: "Ik vind dat we niet iedereen moeten stimuleren om ondernemer te worden, maar ik vind wel dat we mensen moeten stimuleren om ondernemend te worden" ¹. And when it comes to the decision to act at all, his advice is unadorned: "Als je een idee hebt en dat idee lijkt een goed idee te zijn, just do it" ¹.