Jumbo, co-sponsor of Dutch supermarket chain Jumbo Visma, plans to withdraw from sports sponsorship by the end of 2024 at the latest, the chain's new CEO Ton van Veen said.

Jumbo plans to discontinue its sponsorship of Formula 1 racer Max Verstappen as well as its support for the Jumbo Visma skate team, van Veen told the Dutch newspaper AD.

The contract with the cycling team is due to expire at the end of 2024, which will be honored, Van Veen said. But he added that Jumbo would be willing to back out if another sponsor wanted to take over sooner.

"That sponsorship brought us a lot of brand recognition, but we're winning everything we can win now," Van Veen told AD.

"We invest more than 20 million euros in sports sponsorship every year, but every euro can only be spent once. We can't give that money back to our clients or invest it in sustainability or health."

Jumbo entered the market in 2015 as a second sponsor of the men's cycling team, which dates back to 1984. It then became the team's main sponsor in 2019 and formed a women's team in late 2020.

Since then, in men's racing, the team has won all three Grand Tours, with Primoš Roglic winning the Giro d'Italia (2023) and the Vuelta a España (2019, 2020, 2021) and Jonas Vingegaard the Tour de France (2022); of the five monuments, he has won Milan-San Remo (2020, Wout van Aert) and Liège-Bastogne-Liège (2020, Roglic).

Of the top players, Wingegaard is under contract until the end of 2027, Roglic until the end of 2025, Van Aert until the end of 2026, and Marianne Foss until the end of 2025.

Jumbo is a private company with supermarkets in the Netherlands and Belgium with a turnover of over 10 billion euros, and has been the main sponsor of the Jumbo Visma cycling and skating teams since 2015. It has no substantial business interests outside the Netherlands and Belgium.

So far there is no news on any developments regarding the second title sponsor, Visma, a Norwegian business software and IT company.

But already in March, the question was raised as to how long the team's main sponsor would stay with the team, a Jumbo spokesperson told the Dutch news media NOS.

Team boss Richard Plagge told Wielerfritz that month that he felt the sponsors were mulling over their options regarding support for the team: "Something is still afoot at Jumbo."

Prior to this spring, the supermarket group had already withdrawn most of its sponsorship from motorsports as the prosecutor's office launched an investigation into money laundering. Former CEO Fritz van Elde resigned his position at the company after being interviewed as part of the ongoing investigation. Jumbo commissioned a fact-finding investigation and stated in its annual report that "there was nothing that could have led to a crime within Jumbo."

Also in December 2022, chairman and Dutch supermarket entrepreneur Karel van Eert, who led the company through a period of increased sports sponsorship, died at the age of 84.

According to Wielerflits, the most recent contract between the company and the team was signed in 2019 and had a term of five years. It appears that Jumbo contractually had the option to continue sponsoring the team for two more years, but after being involved in the sport for a total of 10 years decided to pull out.