Little fear of Food Lion leaving its longtime lair.

How well do Food Lion Inc.'s Salisbury stakes go with Brussels sprouts? Might its Belgian owner be looking for a new home for its American holding company in the wake of its $3.6 billion takeover of Scarborough, Maine-based Hannaford Bros. Co. last summer?

"We have no plans to move the headquarters of Delhaize America out of Salisbury" -- Food Lion's home since it was founded 42 years ago, spokesperson Tawn Earnest says. "Our CEO has said he does not plan on creating a new layer of bureaucracy."

Of course, Delhaize America, the new holding company for Food Lion, Hannaford and another supermarket chain in Florida, represents a layer of bureaucracy, albeit a tiny one. As of September, its only employees were President and CEO Bill McCanless, who is also CEO of Food Lion, and Chairman Pierre Beckers, the CEO of Etablissements Delhaize Freres et Cie "Le Lion" S.A., which has long owned the majority of Food Lion's voting shares. McCanless is a native of Salisbury. Beckers lives in Brussels.

Since the Hannaford deal was announced, Food Lion, which had been the corporate umbrella, has been trying to bring its structure more in line with other major, acquisition-minded grocery chains. The stock moved from NASDAQ to the New York Stock Exchange to "enhance the visibility of the company's shares within the investment community and to place it among its peer group of large, multiregional supermarket chains."

What does a large, multiregional supermarket chain look like? Check out Ahold USA, which owns BI-LO among others. Ahold USA runs its family of grocery stores from an Atlanta corporate office, which answers to Royal Ahold N.V. in the Netherlands. Food Lion/Delhaize officials say they're not interested in building a separate corporate office.

One Salisbury resident keeping a close watch on the changes is founder Ralph Ketner, who still owns a large block of stock. "Since their holding company is now going to be the headquarters, it can be anywhere. It can be in Belgium." But why go anywhere, he adds. "If I were Pierre and I lived in Brussels, I'd just get two or three little bookkeepers there [in Salisbury] to punch in figures of the divisions and give me a printout every Monday morning."

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