Groceryshop 2026 Takeaways | Live

All right.

Good afternoon, everybody.

So a very warm welcome to Grocery shop Key Takeaways 2020 6.

I am Ben Miller.

I'm the host of the new weekly Grocery Talk podcast from the Omnitalk Podcast network.

And I'm going to be guiding you through this session.

I'm going to be steering the conversation with my wonderful co panelists.

Firstly, for everybody in the room, congratulations.

Well done.

You've made it to the very last last session of the show.

Thank you for being here with us.

We really appreciate it.

We are also recording this session.

It's going to go out as a podcast episode on the Omnitalk Network and on Grossertalk.

So welcome to everybody who is listening in.

Right.

Firstly, I'd like to introduce you to my wonderful panelists who are going to unpick with me the good, the bad, and the hopefully not too ugly of the show.

First up on the end is Deborah Vineswig.

Deborah is founder and CEO of retail and technology insight company Coresight Research.

Welcome, Deborah.

In the middle we have Kelly.

Kelly Linderdao, who is content director at Grocery Shop.

Yes, Kelly is a linchpin in the team that's brought all the onstage content for you to the show this week.

So welcome, Kelly.

And last, but by no means least, next to me is Chris Walton, president and CEO of Omnitalk Retail, the media network for retailers run by retailers.

Welcome, Chris.

Thank you.

Okay, so here is how this session is going to work.

What I've done is I've picked eight topics that link to eight questions that I want to understand that I've been trying to find answers to about the show.

So I want to know what my illustrious panel has learned and taken away for each one.

But I absolutely recognize that this is content session number 50 of the week.

After 30 plus hours of content, we're hopefully going to keep you entertained.

We're going to go fast paced, we're going to get through and we are going to get straight to the point.

And if my esteemed colleagues don't, I'm going to try and keep them in check.

So if that's all right for everybody, let's get going.

Our first question is on a gentic grocery, and my question is very simple.

Did we get a clearer picture of where the agentic end game might be for grocery?

So go on, Chris, you're next to me.

So I'm going to throw this one first.

I'm going to throw this one to you first.

All right.

I'll flatly say no.

Okay.

I think we have no clear Picture of where the agentic future is headed, Ben.

That's what I'd say.

And I think it's funny.

You and I were talking backstage before we came on.

I think it was this panel two years ago where we asked the question, is AI overhyped or underhyped?

And the general consensus was that it was overhyped at the time.

Yeah.

And now we've got CEOs, like the Instacart CEO, which you moderated your interview with him on the first day of the show, saying, like, agentic AI is going to be so impactful that it's going to change the grocery industry more than any other vertical in retail.

So we've gone pretty far in two years.

Yep, yep.

And I think to say that anyone has the vision to where it's going next would actually be deluding themselves to some degree.

And so for me, I was thinking, okay, so what would I.

How would I look at that question?

And we had a great interview with Mark Williamson, who's the AVP of retail media at Costco, and he had the best way to look at it.

I'm going to paraphrase what he said, so I'm not going to quote him directly, but he basically summed it up where he said, people will shop the way they want and it isn't Costco's job.

That's because he was talking about Costco or any retailer's job to talk them out of using agents.

Our job is to plug in so our items and value show up how our customers want it.

And I think that's right.

And I think the other thing it tells me is that answer is going to be different by retailer, by brand as well.

Interesting, interesting lots there.

Kelly, I want to say, what do you think?

Yeah, I'm gonna back Chris up here.

I think we're very much still in the early stages.

I do think we do have a fair.

Like there are some things that are established, like agentic shopping assistants.

They're not going anywhere.

They're here.

But I do think now there's so much potential in how each brand and how each retailer really makes it their own and finds their own unique features.

You know, you have like Magalu in Brazil, they have Lou, who is their virtual influencer, who they turned into an AI powered salesperson on WhatsApp.

And then on the other hand, you have schnucks who built their own assistant shopping assistant in store.

And that focuses on everything a customer can ask, no matter how small, even if it's just like, hey, what Time does my store open?

So I think you have two extremes.

I think you're really going to start seeing people now that we have kind of the foot under us a little bit, really start working to personalize it.

And make it that own Interesting.

Deborah, at the end, are you agreeing or are you going to be the contrarian view that says, absolutely, Ben, I'm going to tell you exactly where this is all headed.

Ben.

Ben knows me way too well.

I'm going to take the other side.

So I think that we heard from a very large CPG and supply chain a 75% increase in the last 90 days of agentic commerce.

We heard from Instacart how people are using it for meal planning, for recipes.

And we're starting to see this idea around this kind of customer journey.

Now, the customer doesn't necessarily know what's behind it, but this idea that they're not having to work as hard, they're able to find a meal for, let's say, for $40, they're able to do a much better job of budgeting their grocery spend each week and they're able to shop multiple retailers and brands and they're also able to find, if they have food allergies, any other sensitivity for their family in a much easier way.

And so I think that the customer is going to be leading us on this journey, as is the sales associate, because they're going to be able to serve the customer so much better.

So if you think about shareholder value creation driven by the customer and the employee, I think we are much farther along on this path than many would have expected once again, 90 days ago.

And I think what we're going to see over the holiday season is going to surprise all of us.

Interesting.

Okay.

I'm going to give you what I think is probably my word of the show and my word of the show is disintermediation, because I think that that is the threat and that's the concept that's going to drive how agenti is going to deliver.

Close to that, probably.

Muse was maybe my number two word of the show.

And it's the same thing.

The whole idea of Muse is that it's an agent that actually does more for you.

And I think we're moving into a world where people are trying to work out how, as an individual retailer, do I avoid the risk of this intermediation if the third party agents do more for us?

So we've been involved in lots of conversations where the retailers have been talking about making sure they are building agent E commerce capabilities on their own and operated assets.

So it might not be the end game, but I think that's the one that retailers should be planning for at the moment.

And just as an example of that, I was really taken by what Jeremy Gosch said in his keynote this morning.

He was talking about how to.

We were talking about the need for speed.

And if I'm going to be truly honest, I asked the question because I expected it to be about speed of delivery.

That's what I was thinking.

Yeah, I was.

Speed of delivery.

What he talked about was speed of shopping.

And he said at the Moment it takes 44.0min to shop their website.

They're currently reskinning the website.

They're going to, well, not reskin it, redesigning it from scratch.

Going to be launching really soon.

And their ambition is that they can make it shoppable in five minutes.

And it's agentic.

That's going to underpin the ability to do that.

So if that's the thinking that's happening in grocers across the country, I think disintermediation and avoiding the risk of it is the next big thing.

Go on.

I'm seeing nods and shakes.

Anybody agree or disagree?

I mean, I think the disintermediation point, which I hadn't heard much before.

Grocery shop.

I agree with you wholeheartedly.

That was kind of.

If it wasn't said in each conversation, it was kind of in the air around each conversation.

And so I think the word for the.

Well, it's more than one word, so two words.

We'll say phrase.

But operating system, that I heard more and more.

So how can the retailers themselves build an operating system that others can plug into?

And how can they communicate that throughout their kind of vendor network?

And so I agree with you, Ben.

I think we are starting to hear that.

And muse, I mean, the minute you brought muse.

Right.

Like, it just opened up a whole new conversation.

Yep.

And so, I mean, you were at the dinner we hosted last night.

So someone said something that I've only said in my head and I was shocked to hear someone say it out loud.

And I think it's still kind of like shaking me to the core.

But the idea that the LLM becomes the store is truly something that I have worried about.

And it's like shaken me almost to my core.

Because if you start to think about true disintermediation, that's it.

Yeah, I think that.

And therefore driving the creation within your own ecosystem.

Okay.

We talked a lot about AI.

I think this has been the show me the money show.

And by that I mean, what is the best AI use case that you've heard this week?

Kelly, I'm going to throw to you first on this one.

Okay, awesome.

And I'm going to steal from Chris's session for my example because I'm going to call out Myron Frazier of Sam's Club with his Members Mark program.

So it allows the Sam's Club members, it brings them into their product development so they can test their private label products and give their feedback in real time.

And then the AI element comes into that because it keeps track of their preferences, keeps track of, you know, what they liked, what they didn't like.

So now Sam's Club is going to start using that to predict future purchases and better understand their behaviors and just identify maybe white spaces where a product might kind of be lacking.

So I think that's cool that you're using direct customer feedback from your loyal customers you already have and just innovating from there while also benefiting yourself and also benefiting your customers because they're getting a more tailored journey.

Yeah, that was really neat new news that came out from Myron that was interesting.

Chris, what about yourself?

Best AI use case.

Oh, man.

Well, you know, Ben, you know me well, so I'm a sucker for anything that helps the store associates, having been a store manager and district manager for Target back in the day.

Mine is actually kind of funny, though.

It's kind of a twist on that.

It helps the store's associates, but I would actually couch it as dummy AI.

Okay, yeah, dummy AI.

Well, it comes from, you know, it's something I heard in your interview that you did for Omnitalk a couple days ago, which was you were interviewing Sherd Hollerman, who's the man in charge of product and AI at Albert Hein, which, for those that maybe aren't familiar, Albert Hein is a big Dutch grocer.

And he told this cool story about how he thinks about deploying AI in the organization.

He was cooperating.

So they've got 80,000 employees.

One of them happens to be his daughter.

And his daughter's working in the store.

And he told this story about how his daughter all the time gets asked these questions from different people that are shopping and she always has to go to the bakery to get the answer because she doesn't know that know the answer that they want from her.

And so he heard this and he's like, okay, we gotta fix that.

And so what he did was really brilliant.

He went into the store and he created like a faux interface for the sales associates to use, thinking it was AI.

And then he stashed people in the back of the store, answering the questions in live time so they didn't know the difference.

They didn't know it wasn't AI.

And so the reason he did that though, which is really brilliant, is because, and it was really great.

He's like, I'm never going to lead with technology for my solution.

I want to understand the problem so then I can design the best potential AI system to solve that.

So he got a sense of what questions were being asked, what data was going to be required to help this the store associates the most.

And so I thought that was a really interesting like flip for how we typically see technology implementations going into stores.

Really?

Yeah.

Great start.

Deborah, what's the best AI actual genuine implementation use case you've heard this week?

I think we heard it from the stage with Instacart CEO where customers using their AI assistant saw a 50% larger basket.

And I, you know, talking to folks, this idea around kind of having almost meals that you can buy, right?

Like you're doing tacos at night because how often do you forget something and you're not knocking on the neighbor's door anymore.

But you may be using a, you know, any one of a number of e commerce sites and kind of quick commerce.

But this idea that you can have an assistant to help you kind of remember everything that you need, but also make suggestions whether it's price or, or product in real time that are personalized to you.

And I think this other word, Ben, that we heard a lot more than I expected.

And it's not just kind of theoretical at this point was around personalization.

So if you think about it, right, someone mentioned Sam's Club, Costco, BJ's, right, where to go in the door, you have everything tied to your loyalty card, club card.

This idea that you can get kind of real time personalized, basically decisions made for you while you're in the store and you can go from 40 minutes down to 5.

This idea around how commerce is going to change and how I think we'll see greater kind of like utils of happiness because you're getting more of what you want at the price you can afford.

I think we're seeing that journey and you know, we're at the beginning of the path but you know, it's, it's started and I think a lot of that intelligence happened here at grocery shop.

Great.

I've got an example hopefully some of you in the audience might have seen Jim Johannes session from Fruitist.

Super interesting.

So Fruitist, the premium blueberry brand.

So I was very ignorant.

I think it's probably because I'm British, don't know much about blueberries.

But Jim told me how they, under his leadership of the technology function, have recreated the entire flows of their organization and everything starts with the forecast.

So we said the whole organization is start with the forecast and the forecast is built out of AI, but this is super advanced.

So let me give you two examples.

One, they are using satellite imagery to scan the entire country of Peru, which is where the majority of their premium brewberries are grown, to understand how the crops are developing, when they're going to hit what the market supply and demand is going to be, and then they can time their route to market and their flow together.

So really macro.

And that's possible through a load of computer vision and a load of AI at a micro level.

They're then flying drones with cameras with computer vision and they're assessing their crops on 25,000 hectare farms to individual berry level to know exactly the right time to pick it, to get it.

Because for them it's all about the consistency of the product.

And the better consistency of the product, the better customer experience.

And particularly with more and more fruit and more and more produce going through E Com, you've got that risk of will the picker get me a good thing?

You want that consistent experience and that's what their brand is all about.

I loved it.

I was completely taken by that.

Good thing it wasn't strawberries.

Yes.

Yeah, that would be a lot harder.

A lot harder.

Okay, how soon is now?

I mentioned it once, I'm gonna get there again.

What did we learn about shoppers seemingly insatiable need for speed and how the industry is evolving to reflect that.

Deborah, you kick us off on this one.

Thank you for letting me take the lead.

So as many of you know, one of my favorite topics is live streaming and we are starting to see that in grocery.

So why is that important?

Because you can get real time, the need for speed feedback before you make a purchase.

You can also understand more.

You can start to really get to know even like the grower of your product.

So whether it's oranges or bananas, and going back to the bananas comment, right, this idea around, some people like to buy green bananas, some people like them yellow, some people like them yellow with brown spots.

And so the ability to get exactly what you need in real time and to also be able to get the information that you need, right?

Whether it's ingredients, whether it's how to prepare it, this opportunity to drive customers in kind of in screen experience, a live kind of back and forth.

And in some cases you have an audience who can also jump in, like, oh, I tried this recipe or I tried that.

And so the customer then feels like not only have they been satisfied by this could be direct to brand or retailer or platform, but you also bring in the audience.

You can order it and it can be at your home, quick commerce, 10 minutes.

But this idea around speed of decision and speed of receipt, I think it's both.

And I think the customer is looking to take down decision fatigue.

Because when I go into a grocery store, and I do love mustard, but when there are on average about 89 SKUs, it is very difficult to make those decisions.

And I'm often looking at taste profile and price.

But I think if you can utilize live streaming from that.

And we're still at a very early place in the US at about 4% of E commerce sales.

But my prediction is we'll see significant growth in the fourth quarter and on into 2027.

A lot of it based on AI technology that once again, we heard about at the show.

Chris, are you thinking need for speed as in delivery or decision making or both?

I think everything.

Okay.

I think everything.

Yeah.

And I do want to say that I had the bingo card of Deborah talking about live streaming on this channel.

So.

So yeah, you get the prize.

Yeah.

Right.

You knew it was gonna happen at some point.

That's great.

No, I think it's everything, you know, and the frame, the frame I'd use is Instacart.

Instacart had a great frame for that.

You know, they said, like they said, they said people are so consumed with the stress of like trying to figure out what the heck to plan for dinner every night, you know, and that's because people are time starved.

And the other point I'd make that kind of plays into the speed thing too is people are also budget constrained.

And so when you put those two things together, like you're busy, you're budget constrained, you just gotta make decisions really quickly.

You don't have a lot of time because you gotta probably go out and make some money too.

Yeah.

And so that's what AI is so great about.

Because AI takes the cognitive load off of us in a lot of ways and frees us up and enables us to be fake faster in everything we're doing.

There could be a lot of downside to that too.

But that's ultimately what's happening here and that's the impact I see on the industry.

You see, I was thinking about marketplaces delivery in a slightly different way.

Okay.

I think one of the things that I've noticed this show, just last week we had DoorDash with Uber Eats with Costco.

This week Instacart with GoPuff, Airbnb, which I think is super cool, what they're doing there.

And then Dollar General on Wednesday, we are going to see more and more retailers on marketplaces and more and more multiple marketplaces per retailer.

What do I think is the implication of that?

I think firstly, there's a retailer perspective, there's some negotiations, but what there really is is for the shopper, you've got the opportunity to choose, which is going to drive competition, which is going to drive innovation.

So I think the customer experience of using these platforms is going to be better.

That's my hunch where that's going to go.

I have to jump in because what was so interesting at CES this year is the amount of specialty retailers talking about selling on DoorDash and also Instacart and how that was their fastest growing channel.

And one that talked about a bingo card.

Right.

They hadn't even expected it.

And so we're talking about going far beyond grocery into other areas.

And if you start to think about prescription drugs, otc, hba.

But Ben, I couldn't agree with you more.

I think that the opportunity that kind of avails and as you're starting to see some of these shifts in some of these marketplaces and these platforms, it's fascinating.

Go on.

We're almost out of time, but Chris.

Go, go, go.

You're itching.

That's why I come back to your disintermediation comment too.

Because if that's happening, then there's a ton of disintermediation that happens.

Particularly because as AI starts to stand up on these sites, it makes those marketplaces incredibly powerful.

And so there is going to be this push and pull tension between the grocers and the marketplaces to decide where do they put their products, who are they going to sell through, and then also who decides to white label their services just for delivery instead.

And so that's an interesting question that I think we're still waiting to see how it plays out.

Okay, so I'm following up.

I'm going to move this on because.

We're going to be out of time.

I'm trying to get it in the.

Next Part we're going to be out of time.

Yeah.

The next question I'm going to go to is Supermarket Sweep, which is a 90s TV reference for any Brits in the audience.

Okay.

Across the US Supermarket format stores have been losing share.

Okay.

So what have we heard this week about how they can respond?

Deborah, do you want to kick us off?

Yes, because Chris just set me up perfect.

Yeah.

So I love your point about kind of the grocer brand.

So if you start to think about what's going to matter, it is private label.

And I think that that is what I mean.

You think about some of the retailers and some of your favorite products.

Right.

I think, you know, Kroger and Target, just where I am geographically come to mind.

And so as they focus and they lean more into their private label as their brand, and you can only get it at Kroger, at Target, or any one of a number of retailers.

Those are just the two that, like I said, I buy the most often because of geography.

And then I goes back to Chris's point.

As you start to think about these platforms.

Right.

Pulling the private label out of the traditional retail format and being able to buy it in other dimensions, I think is going to be critical.

And when you think about the margins on that as well.

And so what we're seeing from a CPG perspective and private label is that they are partnering in unique ways, whether it's from a manufacturing perspective, ingredients perspective, or or even kind of some of this exclusive product perspective.

And so I think that going back to what drives people into more traditional boxes ends up being exclusive product and private label.

And I think that we are in a very interesting place once again driven by agentic commerce and how people are thinking about LLMs, which eventually ends up being also good for the physical store.

We're bringing so many trends together.

Kelly, I want to bring you in here at this point.

What have you heard about options for supermarkets?

Yeah.

So what I'm going to say is going to sound initially counterproductive to the question.

I do think that websites and apps need the same attention as stores, and that will ultimately drive people back into the store.

Because if you think about it, you know, the most frequent touch point consumers have with your brand or your company is on your website or on your app.

That's where they go all the time.

That's where the most foot traffic is.

Right.

So you need a really solid digital storefront.

And if you could really capitalize on that, you could then tailor promotions or, you know, anything to get your Loyal consumers are always on your website or on your app in your store.

So I think if you could put a little more in your website and then really optimize your website to push in store, I think that's, you could kind of start bringing it back.

Interesting, interesting.

Chris, what have you heard on this one?

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think the interesting question to me is more like who's going to take the share in the physical retail world?

Okay.

And so that's where to Deborah's point, I would actually, I think I'd take it up.

I agree with her on private label, but I take it up a level too.

And I think the next 10 years are going to be defined by pricing in the market particularly.

So that's, you know, that's why you're going to private label, because there's a better value there.

But the price transparency across the industry is going to be at a level we've never seen before.

So you take your point about marketplaces.

If we're on all these marketplaces or we're interacting with LLMs and we can simply say who has the best price for this basket of items that I want to buy, that's an unparalleled position of power that we're in as consumption.

And so that is something that we're going to have to really think about.

And so the most interesting announcement that I heard at this show was Instacart aligning with Dollar General and 20,000 of their stores which are.

And Instacart is pricing them to the store level.

Pricing, there's no add up markup.

Dollar General's already been taking share, Costco's been taking share, Sam's Club's taking share.

That's the world we're living in.

So retailers are going to have to start investing in price to make sure that they know how they want to price themselves.

But the biggest thing is too is loyalty.

They've got to get their loyalty programs dialed in.

Yeah.

And this was the exact premise of the question that I wanted to put my interview with Jeremy Goscher Hyvee around, because Hy Vee is one of the few supermarket chains in the US taking share at the moment and taking share from some of the organizations the you've just met, which really books a trend.

So the question is kind of how.

We had a really good conversation.

We talked about value.

He talked about 15,000 prices that they make sure they are cheapest in the market for.

But I think the thing that really engaged me was when he talked about moving back from their standalone value format.

So he created something called Dollar Fresh Market.

Really, that was an opportunity to try and compete directly with Aldi, almost my words, not his.

To be the Aldi in the market.

Before Aldi got into the market, what they found is that was not the right strategy.

Actually, what works for them is to be the best Hy vee they can be.

So they're moving out, they're reformatting those stores, and they're turning back into Hy Vee.

And I think there is, you know, there are a number of retailers in this market who are using multiple banners and losing that ability to have a sense of identity.

And I think that to drive the identity, to drive the storytelling and to drive the private label, I think be the best single thing you can be.

So I took that away from the Hy Vee conversation.

All right, tech talks.

Have you discovered a piece of or a bit of technology this week that has excited you?

Deborah, I'm going to ask you first, you have the privilege of running the pitch competition each year at Grocery Store Shop.

So who won Startup Pitch in one minute and did they excite you?

So there were two winners, and both were solving a problem that we haven't really heard a lot of companies solving for before.

So I would almost use it as a jumping off point for new technology.

So one was Shelf Life, which tries right now they're only dealing with center of store, but expired products.

And how do you get ahead of it?

So whether it's marking it down or, you know, kind of going back to the vendor, but, you know, trying to basically get it to the customer, partnering with companies like Good to Go.

So that was one.

And I thought I've always.

We've, of course, I've focused a lot on the kind of significant opportunity that 38% of all food grown ends up in landfill.

And so, right.

If you could even bring that down to half, you could feed everybody.

So I thought what she was doing was really interesting.

And then on Perfect Store Group, this was actually so the whole idea around kind of like how some of these products get discovered and who's selling to whom, and especially for some of the smaller products and commissions they may have to pay, etcetera, and really creating kind of this salesforce ultimately to help your products get into the hands of those who want to buy it.

I mean, really, to your point earlier, I thought which was really interesting is how do you kind of like create this transparency around price, promotion and also product availability?

And so neither of those have really kind of been discussed in the level of detail or with the approach.

So I think they were both really interesting.

They're probably both really early, but I think it goes back to they are a jumping off point for technology to be built on top of.

Good.

Kelly, what's excited you tech wise this week?

Yeah, so I'm also going to talk about startup pitch.

One of the contestants was Blue Collar Robotics and they helped to show Streamline in store order, online order fulfillment in stores.

So they have robots that focus on the center store.

So the stuff that's not so precious, where it's like a box of cereal or oatmeal to pick, and then it leaves the picking of fresh meat or produce in the hands of actual associates who could figure out like, oh, hey, this is a really ripe apple.

Let's give it to the associate.

Not a robot that might just kind of grab the rotten one that might be on its way out.

So I think that's cool that the robots and people are going to work together to optimize and fulfill those orders.

Chris, I'm slightly concerned about asking you this.

From some of the changes you've made, has anything excited you this week?

Wow.

No.

From a tech perspective?

Oh, no, not really.

I mean, I think that's good though.

Okay, well, I think, you know, right or wrong there, I've said that I had a lot of people on when I was walking the floor tell me this too.

Like, there hasn't been one whiz bang tech, you know, there was no right or wrong, no, no robot dog or dancing robot, you know, that everyone's talking about and videos are being shot of it or whatever.

And I think that's good because where we are as an industry is trying to find the practical applications of how to deal with all of this.

And so the one that I would call out was Ajo Delez.

They've got their Edge Agentic Media Planner, which basically they're using agentic AI to help plan their media buys.

And they're doing it to the point where they can trust it.

And so that's just one application.

And I think those are the types of applications we're going to hear more and more about.

But they're not sexy.

They don't necessarily get you out of bed in the morning at a conference, especially in Vegas.

But like, you know, that was what I took away from it.

Yeah.

And I think we had Arthur Sylvester, who runs digital and media at Danone, come by the stand and he summed it up really nice.

He said this year is just not about the shiny thing.

It's about it's about the consolidation and making it happen.

And I think that's absolutely right.

Okay, we've got 10 minutes left, so we're going to do two more and we're going to do quite rapid fire.

OK, so the first one is stat of the show.

Chris, I'm going to throw to you on this.

What's your favorite stat of the show?

Stat of the show.

That one for me was right in the beginning.

It was from your interview with Chris Rogers.

He said that the grocers on the Instacart platform that use same as in store pricing grow 10 percentage points faster.

And that's interesting to me because of what I was saying before, because pricing is going to be just so much more important because one, we've got the macroeconomic pressures, which we always talk about.

But then the second piece is, like I said before, the pricing transparency is just going to be so much more readily available to all of us to make better decisions to save ourselves money.

And so the implications of that to me are, you know, you've got to figure that out.

And so when I look at the grocery industry, if you're still playing a high low game in that landscape five to 10 years out, you're probably in the crosshairs of not liking where you're sitting right now.

At least I'm not.

Yeah, I think that's very fair.

Kelly.

Yeah, so mine is from McKinsey's 2026 State of Grocery, and it's that 85% of consumers say private label quality matches or even beats out of national brands.

So I just think that's so important because it shows that private label is now on equal footing with these national brands.

And now that it's kind of, you know, shed the stereotype that might be lesser quality or lesser product, it's no, we are actually hitting with the big national brand.

So I think that just opens up so much potential for retailers to almost turn their stores into their own brand where their private label products are now actually bringing people in and building loyalty that way.

So I think there's going to be a lot of exciting things happening in.

Private label now that it's 85%.

Okay, that's big.

That's big.

Deborah Stat of the show.

So I've always been very focused on on shelf availability because you, I mean, and these days if you're picking from the store, if it's not on the shelf, nobody can buy it.

And so we heard for those using whether it's computer vision or autonomous robots like Simbi, a 35% increase in on shelf availability and a 10% increase in sales per store.

And so this idea that this technology can not only help you, your kind of online shoppers, but in store shoppers and the cost with which it's kind of, you know, come down to it is truly transformational and.

Right.

I think what we were told is that basically like the return is like four to six months now, which I think in, you know, let's call it a few years ago it was probably three to five years.

So the cost of compute is coming down so much.

The cost of technology and the ways to use it and the ways to integrate it so seamlessly with the customers that I think is critical.

But it goes back to it needs to be on the shelf for anyone to buy it.

Okay, brilliant.

I'm going to hit you with two.

I know, rapid fire so I get more time.

One of them is cheating actually because it was the stat that I created.

So this is the first time we were going to discuss it at the show.

I was actually doing some work for something on Monday and I looked at what the year on year gas price increase on average gasoline in the US is.

So this is from the AAA on Monday, the year on year increase was 41% of pump prices.

So when we talk about the affordability challenge, that really puts it into stark concept for me.

The second was a quote from Brian Monaghan.

So Brian is SVP of retail media at the Albertsons Media Collective.

He shared that 8% of Albertson trips come from somebody having forgotten an ingredient for something they're trying to cook.

And in many ways, like that's probably not a big surprise.

My kind of aha moment for that is when you link that to agentic commerce.

If the whole idea of Regentic is he starts to know who you are, can predict things, replant and take care of basket composition for you, the likelihood of forgetting things goes down and, and therefore all these incremental trips could potentially drop.

I'm making three steps ahead there, but I thought that was really interesting.

All right, go on.

Quote of the show.

Chris, I'm going to throw to you first on this one.

Oh man.

Okay.

Quote of the show.

Well, for me, so I'm also a merchant by trade, spent a lot of time in merchandising in my career.

So I got the chance to interview Myron Fraser, who's the chief merchant at Sam's Club and it was really cool, like getting to talk to him.

Because we talked about how he, he spent time in the historical archives of Walmart and he discovered like this 40 year old document that someone at Sam's, I don't remember the guy's name at Sam's Club, it wasn't Sam Walton, but it was somebody that helped founding shape Sam's Club.

And he had 10 points of what makes a good Sam's Club item.

And one of those points was that the item sells itself and that that's a key ingredient to being successful.

And that's something as a merchant that I've thought about but I've never actually articulated it.

You know that it's not about the packaging, it's not about the sexy design, it's like it's about do you know what the item is and can people get it and understand it and do they want to take it home just by looking at it.

So I thought that was, that was just a really cool thing that he shared with me that I'd never thought about.

I really like, I also really like Myron's summary of their merchandising strategy as distinctive products at disruptive prices.

If you can take a whole approach to merchandising and just distill it down to five words and everybody understand what that means and it to be uniquely yours, I thought that was really clever.

And I mean some people that'll be really familiar phrase to others might be hearing it for the first time at the show.

And I'll add that a lot.

Kelly, give me a quote.

So mine is from Stuart Samuel at IGD and he said we really need to rethink what innovation is and it has to start with the consumer.

And I think, you know, just across the show and even in this topic we all talk about tech, retail, media, AI, personalization data.

And I think a lot of times when there's so much like new products coming and all this innovation, you could get caught up in the shiny new object syndrome.

I think before you could even think about onboarding those, you have to take a step back and say what are my customer problems, how could I solve them and what technology is going to help me get there?

Amen.

Deborah, quote to the show the shopper.

Is not asking for AI, they're asking for less.

Work was done a closed door session and I think it goes back to right we're, you know, kind of every third word is AI.

But when we think about the customer and we think about the employee, once again, what ultimately drives shareholder value, it's not this focus, it's I think eliminating decision fatigue and also helping people make more of the right decisions.

And so whether it's how you kind of do those documentations, right, from an AI perspective, et cetera.

So it's much easier in store to make those decisions.

But ultimately the customer just wants to be able to, I mean, really to what Kelly said.

But you want to find more of what you love and to find it easier.

And so I think that's the direction we're heading.

I'm going to wrap with a quote of the show.

For me, I'm not going to tell you who it's from because he was given off stage.

It's from a retailer and they'd been to see the Doordash keynote and they said, I'm worried.

I'm worried their thinking isn't right about their agent.

Like, okay, why?

Let's work it through.

I said, well, they called it Ask Doordash.

Okay, what's the problem?

He said, if you're still thinking that agents is something you have to ask, you're still thinking about a search engine.

And that's the old fashioned word.

He said, within their retailer, they are working on their agents to be proactive and to take action.

And I think that was a bit of a check.

If you're still thinking about AI as something that you need to ask and interact with as a search engine rather than as something you expect to start doing things for you, then that boat's already sailed.

And I thought that was really interesting.

On that note, that was silent.

Okay, great.

In which case, all I'm going to say is the shop, shop talk.

Shop talk will be back, but so will grocery shop.

I'm gonna get the brand right slightly earlier next year, September 13th to the 15th, back here in Las Vegas.

Thank you everybody for joining us again this year.

Thank you for staying to the end.

Travel safely, take care and we'll see you again soon.

Thank you very much.