Good Food Holdings CEO Neil Stern: Smart Stores, Changing Consumer Behavior & Beating Agentic AI

Welcome back, everyone.

It is day two of Grocery Shop 2025.

I'm Ann Mazinga.

And I'm Chris Walton.

And we are here live from the Fusion group booth, number 1663.

1663.

Come by anytime today.

We're going to be doing tons of interviews.

But, Chris, the best interview to kick off day two is none other than the gentleman standing in between us.

Here we have the CEO of Goodfield, Goodfield Food Holdings.

My gosh, I'm so sorry.

Good.

It's early.

It's early.

It's early.

And then we can tell you've been in Vegas for a while because it's actually day three of Grocery Shop It.

Or not.

Okay.

I was going to say this is.

Day two of our coverage.

Day two of our coverage.

Yes.

I knew Neil was thinking the same thing.

It's day three, but it feels like day 40 in.

In.

In Grocery Shop days.

Yeah.

This is why we love dog years.

Because you understand the true grit it takes to get through.

Through grocery shops.

For sure.

So much good content.

But thank you.

Yes.

But Neil Stern, one of our favorite guests, we had him here last year as well.

So, Neil, remind our audience about who you are and what good.

Good Food holdings is as well.

All right.

Apparently Good Food holdings is hard to say, but we're gonna work today in morning in February.

This is an Ann problem.

That's a Crisp problem.

So Good Food holdings, we operate premium grocery stores up and down the west coast of the United States from San Diego to Seattle.

We do it with five distinct banners.

Okay.

And our mission is to operate the best stores in the local markets we operate, and we do it by sourcing, producing and selling great food.

So even though we say good food, we're really about great food.

And that's the ethos that we have in our company.

And what are those banners?

Names, Neil?

We have.

I'll do north to south this time.

I have metropolitan markets in Seattle.

New season.

Say the Alphabet backwards.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

This is a difficulty.

You're really challenging yourself on day three.

I had a little bit to drink last night, too, at the Simbi booth.

Yeah.

So New Seasons Market in Portland, New Leaf Community Markets in Santa Cruz.

We just opened a brand new New Leaf on Saturday.

So we're super excited about that in Santa Cruz.

Oh, great.

And then we have Bristol Farms and Lazy Acres in Southern California.

All right, well, okay, Neil, so how long have you been enrolled now?

It's five.

It's exactly five years.

Okay.

Exactly five years.

Congrats.

I got a gold watch.

Or something for that.

Do they still do that?

No, we don't.

Okay.

It was like maybe a golden apple or something.

The CEO of Good Food holdings writes people letters.

So I have to write myself a letter congratulating myself on my five year anniversary.

So can we comment on that?

Can we add content?

Well, Neil, I'm curious, like as you, you've been in this job now for five years.

You have a multitude of banners that you just shared.

Where are you finding efficiencies with like back office operations?

Because I don't think we give that enough conversation here at grocery shops.

So what have you been able to achieve there?

This is perfect.

So I'm going to continue on my mission statement.

All right, so we're selling great food.

How we do it is from a good food holding standpoint is centralized tools, local execution.

And there was an amazing.

Lidl spoke yesterday and he had an interview with Joel and he said something like, we are as global as possible and local when necessary.

Right.

I would say we are as local as possible and global when necessary.

I like that.

Right.

So the complete opposite of Lidl, which is, which is, you know, Lidl's fabulous and you know, for good reason.

But, you know, so what we're trying to do is where those efficiencies make sense, where they have no impact on the customer experience at all.

We are going to centralize that, right?

So we have centralized it, We've centralized finance and accounting.

We centralize legal, store development.

We are in the process of doing risk as part of it.

Okay.

So we want to take those areas where we can be efficient, we can create those tools.

But then leaving merchandising, marketing and operations.

To the local markets, where does innovation fall in that?

Innovation is twofold, really.

So yes, it's global.

Yes, it's global.

And the reason I'm doing shows like this, but what we're able to do from an innovation standpoint is kind of place our bets in different places.

So I can run.

We were talking a lot about cameras and whatnot.

So I can run a test in Seattle.

One way I can run something different in Southern California.

I can see what's working.

And then when we align on something, we can roll.

So I want to encourage that local innovation.

But we have central guardrails on kind of pilot proof of concept and all that.

Yeah, yeah.

What I like about that approach too, Neil, is relative to Lidl too, you're at a different starting point than they are.

And that starting point makes sense for the strategy that you have.

All right.

So to that point, you talked about innovation, the smart store, maybe owing back to your start as a consultant, you've been a long proponent of the smart store evolution.

You guys have done a lot in that space.

What's the latest update on it?

What are you learning?

The whole nine yards.

I always told you I was so smart as a consultant, and I'm not that smart as a CEO, right?

I doubt that.

I doubt that.

Yeah.

So I would say we believe firmly, you walk the show.

It's hard not to believe.

We need to.

And I would say on the smart stores, we want to elevate the question up one, which is, what problems do we need to solve?

What other problem we need to solve, and how are you going to solve it?

And I don't think that the problems we need to solve are, you know, are basic.

You know, retail hasn't changed, right?

Right product, right time, right place, right price, right.

We got.

We got it.

We got to get that product right.

And we.

The way we grew and we grew as these wonderful little local chains, and now we're trying to put it together.

We did that historically through experience, through intuition, through, hey, I've got great people, but you can't scale that way, right?

So in order for us to scale, in order for us to get those central efficiencies that we need to produce the results we want, I've got to get smarter, and I've got to get smarter through tools that are going to help me enable that.

So that is what a smart store is going to do.

And I think as we walk the show and we talk about it, it's like, I need to understand what's on my shelf.

I do not have a great idea today of what.

What's on my shelf.

That's.

That's a problem.

You know, that's a.

It's a basic retail problem.

So how am I going to do that?

I can have cameras, I can have robots, I could have drones flying.

I could have.

I could have individuals walking, walking through the store and taking.

Taking photos, right?

There's a lot of.

There's a lot of stuff happening there that gives me a symptom, right?

Like, okay, you're out of Wheat Thins right now.

Why am I out of Weed Thins?

Right.

Wonderful answer.

Easy answer would be, it's sitting in the back room, dummy.

Bring it on the shelf.

In our world, we operate small stores.

We don't have giant back rooms.

That's usually not the case.

Right.

Okay, so now the case is, I didn't.

I Didn't order it or it didn't come through the supplier.

How am I going to fix that?

Right.

And that.

And that's where the smart Store, like, I've got this tool, but I got to make the tool work up into my Right.

Supply chain, and I've got to make it work into my merchants and category managers, because maybe this is Nabisco.

Nabisco's not here.

So I get nothing out of doing Wheat Thins.

But I like Wheat Thins.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Soft pitch for the Wheat Thin.

The Wheat Thin still staying strong in 2025.

Yes.

So maybe the answer is I need four facings of wheat thins, and I only have two.

Right.

So now it gets into category management, space planning.

Right.

And if I don't have that information and data, I. I can't get to those decisions.

Right.

So we believe firmly in smart store.

That's the.

Let's call it the backend and the operations part of it.

And then there's the customer piece of it.

Right, Right.

And the customer piece has been more challenging, frankly.

That's what I was gonna ask you next, Actually, I'm curious because, Anna, I've been doing a lot of thinking, a lot of talking on our podcast too.

I'm actually starting to wonder if the smart store idea is more predicated on getting the stores to run more efficiently than it is to hit all the fancy use cases to.

To drive the customer.

At the end of the day, would you agree with that or how do you think about that, that dichotomy?

I think it's both.

But for sure, the early use case and early ROI is going to be us.

So it's internalized.

And how can I make my operations better, more efficient?

And now if we want to talk carts as an example, smart carts, let's do it.

Yeah.

You know, again, we believe really firmly in that.

I've got to change.

I've got to change consumer behavior.

It's really hard to change.

Really hard to change consumer behavior.

By the way, when they use a cart, they love a cart.

When they use a cart, they love a cart.

The cart actually gets us a higher basket size.

It's good customer satisfaction on it, but I got to get them to use it.

I got to get it into the habits.

And I was talking earlier with someone as simple as, let's talk about reusable bags.

Right?

Like, we know we should use reusable bags.

I gotta change 50 years of habit to do that.

And actually, you know, and it's carrot stick.

Right, Right.

So in our world, it's carrot.

So we, we do something in our new Leaf and Lazy Acres called enviro tokens.

If you bring in your own bag, you get to take a 10 cent token and you get to put it at charity that you have.

Fabulous.

That's a carrot.

Like, right.

Bring your bag, do something good.

Right.

In New Jersey, they've outlawed bags.

Right.

Like that's a switch, that's a stick.

Kind of makes it easier too.

Well, in some ways it will because you will be penalized for your bad behavior not bringing it in.

Right.

So when I think about the carts, at some point, it's almost like when we used to do self service and gasoline, right.

It became, well, if you want full Service, you're paying 20 cents a gallon more.

Okay, I'll do self service.

So at some point, what's my incentive?

Great analogy.

Yeah.

What's my incentive to use the cart that's going to make that a.

It's a better experience.

But what's, you know, how am I going to get rewarded for it?

Right.

And we're not there yet, but we believe it because I think the cart is the way to get truly personalized, one on one interaction with the customer.

We know exactly where they are in the store.

I know who you are, I know what you buy.

And I can get you to the meat department and say, hey, you know, let's do a recipe.

Here's the other items you need.

I can give you a coupon for 50 cents off ground beef and I can give you the.

And that hopefully has value to you as a customer.

Right.

But today, today, if the use case is simply, I can avoid a checkout.

Yeah.

That's not that compelling.

It's not that strong.

So, Neil, I mean, would you say then, I think what I'm taking away from this, would you say then that it's really getting back to what you said at the beginning.

Here is evaluating what your core problem is or challenges that you're trying to solve and then figuring out which of the technologies it might be, that one your team and store operations team can handle and getting the data from them, whether they need, you know, stored data hourly or they need it once a day.

Absolutely.

And then figuring out, you know, it could be a multitude of these solutions coming together to create each smart store.

It could be.

And then the real.

Yeah, so, so if we go back to say, okay, what problem am I trying to solve with the cartoon?

If the problem is just, I don't like your checkouts, there's Yeah, I think, I think it's going to be like, no, I want to inspire, you know, we talked about.

I want to bring the, the tools that customers have available to them online right into the retail shopping experience.

So online they have these multi.

They can filter, you can filter for vegan, you can, you can do recipe development, you can do all these things.

I get to the store and it's like, here's 35,000 products.

Have at it.

Right, right.

Can I make that better for the consumer?

And I think I can, but that's the higher goal to solve for not, hey, let's skip a, you know, let's skip a checkout.

Yeah, I think too.

Do you think as well, Neil, that sometimes we use the.

What problem are you trying to solve too much in the industry?

Because I agree, like when it's tangible about how do we get more productive, how do we improve the operations of the store?

There's a lot of problems that get identified on that.

I think the other side of the coin too is like, what is the opportunity that's unexplored or untapped as well.

Right.

And so smart cards give us that too.

Like you can talk to the consumer in a different way that they've never been talked to before.

You can give them their budget in real time.

Those are opportunities to exploit as opposed to problems that they're thinking.

They're inherently problems as they're shopping.

You get what I'm saying?

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah, that's the Steve Jobs.

Right?

Like I'm going to give you something you didn't know you wanted.

Right, right.

Yeah.

And exactly.

With the cart's like, one of the things is being able to track real time budget.

Right.

I don't.

Customers weren't saying, boy, I wish I had that.

But once they have it, it's like, wow, this actually that's a stress point, particularly right now with what's happening on pricing.

That's a stress point for customers.

Right.

And if I can remove that stress point, what we found is they're actually spending more money, not less, because they have certainty.

Right, right.

Because they're not going up to the till and finding out, oh man, I.

Still have more money left over.

Exactly.

Right.

Well, Neil, I imagine you shared some of that on stage.

I hope you did.

Otherwise, we've got the Yamitak exclusive with Neil on how to create your smart store, which is fine with us too.

But what else did you share on stage on Monday when Chris sent people to another session?

Yeah.

We had no one in our Audience.

There'S only one person to blame here.

Chris was funneling people to the bunkers.

Here.

I was on stage with Wheedle and Schnucks.

By the way, Schnucks, according to Omnitalk, is, is the most intelligent retailer in the US you can't even come to that.

Yeah, you were Kim Anderson.

Is that right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

So you're like, yeah, whatever.

Okay.

Yeah.

I think, I think the message from everybody on stage, not just me, was is we need to, you know, now it sounds like cliches.

Connected store.

Yeah, we need to connect this stuff.

Right.

So I can't have.

And there's so many.

One.

We're staring at them.

There's so many wonderful technology providers here.

If this stuff can't work together, it's not going to work for us.

Right.

So it's a solution.

And the solution needs to talk to each other.

I gave you guys, I won't do it here.

I gave you an example of two suppliers that we have that are great partners of us.

I'm trying to get them to work together.

I'm nine months into the process and I still can't get that done.

That's enormously frustrating.

That should be a switch.

Right?

We talk about APIs and we talk about just seamless integration.

It's not seamless yet.

So the message, the message, of course, is to our suppliers, please make this easier for us, because anytime we have these pain points, and particularly the one thing I did talk about is we have in our stores this wonderful new store we opened in Santa Cruz, New Leaf Community Markets.

We have a coffee and juice bar.

We have a sushi poke bar.

We have a service bakery.

We have a barbecue station.

We have, have a sandwich station.

I'm waiting for you to say, like, salon.

Yeah, yeah.

Service, service, service.

Meat and seafood.

Right.

You know, it is an incredibly.

I, I, I use the example of, like gymnastics.

Right.

We, we are operating high degree of difficulty.

Right.

So, so give us credit for, you know, it's a 10 on difficulty to operate a store like us.

They are hard.

Stores operate.

And then we got to execute.

Right.

So, you know, a perfect world.

I'm 10 on difficulty, 10 on execution.

That builds a barrier, that builds a moat for me against my competitors.

Yep.

The harder I make it, you know, so it's hard enough what we're trying to do.

The more I put in the way of someone.

And again, technology can be viewed.

I think Schnuck sort of said, oh, new technology.

Oh, boy.

The, our associates are so Excited.

New technology, our associates, like, that's more work for me.

That's another thing on my checklist.

You really got to prove it out.

That's another thing on my checklist that you're, that you're giving me to do.

The carts, like, hey, carts are fabulous.

I got to plug them in.

I got to make sure they're going like that.

You know, where, where are my opening.

Store opening checklist was that.

Where are my store closing checklists?

That is the more I give.

Right.

And if it's, if it's robots going down the aisle, somebody's gotta manage that process and we've gotta make it easier for them to do that.

Yeah.

So, Neil, if I read between the lines there, so would you, Would you welcome consolidation across the tech industry to help support retailers in general?

Yeah, I think it has to happen because there's just, there's just too many disparate solutions out there.

Okay.

You know, now who's going to be the consolidator?

I don't want, you know.

Yeah, no, don't, don't want to weigh on that.

But yes, I think it's, I think that's going to be really critical.

It's the next wave to make all this work.

Okay, got it.

All right, let's get you out of here on this.

Okay.

I can't believe we haven't even touched on these two topics.

I know, I know.

We got two topics we want to ask you about before we leave.

And that, God, I could talk to you forever, too.

First one, macroeconomics.

How are you thinking about it?

Don't ask me about the Bears.

Okay, good.

Nah, who cares about the Bears?

They won.

The field goal got blocked.

They finally won.

All right, so first one, macroeconomics.

How are you thinking about it?

What can you tell us about.

I know it's still always like an iffy question and then two agentic.

AI.

Sure.

Because you are on the, you are on the cusp of always looking at things, you know, around the corner.

So we're curious to get your take on that.

Okay.

Yeah.

So macro, the consumer is definitely more cautious.

We have a, we're fortunate to have more premium consumer, a less price sensitive consumer.

That, that's helping us.

But we've seen sales slow in the second half.

Right.

We had a, we had a gangbuster first half.

Things are slow.

We're seeing the consumer be more cautious.

There's all these puts and takes.

There's, there's tariffs.

There's Maha.

Right.

There's, there's, there's there's things that are going to be happening and I think, and I think the consumer is just sort of being a little bit reticent right now.

It's.

I think it's all manageable, by the way.

So there's nothing.

I don't, I don't think the sky's falling, but I think it's going to be a tougher environment.

And just from a macro grocery standpoint, units are down.

Right.

So we are, you know, as an industry, we are selling less units.

And, you know, so I look at the two numbers I look at every day are where are we on units?

And where are we in inflation?

Okay.

So we're running internal inflation, around 3%.

Okay.

Which basically means if I don't run a 3% comp, I'm going backwards.

Right.

Like so, you know, and so we are seeing a lot of pressure on, on that from a macro standpoint.

Agentic.

Yeah.

Which is.

Yeah, like, Frank, it's really interesting.

AI has not been mentioned as much as this conference as it was last year.

So that's really.

Wow.

Maybe you're refreshing a little bit.

Yeah.

Or it's just embedded in every single thing now, so there's no need to call it out.

Yeah.

But you need to say omnitalk AI.

Right, right.

Because last year it was like, I'm going to add AI to everything that I'm.

That I'm doing.

And now I think it's more embedded.

Yeah.

Agentic.

It's scary.

It's really interesting.

What our answer for that is going to be.

Yes, we're going to lean on our partners to hopefully give us solutions to what we should be doing.

But really our answer for us is how do I get more and more differentiated so that if Agentic is going to be running the show, I have products that only I have that they're going to shop at our store and to go, all right, I'll end with weekends.

Middle of the weekends, why not?

So if the world is about who can sell Wheat Thins the cheapest.

Yes.

Our stores, Bristol Farms, Metropolitan Market, we lose.

Right.

We are not.

We are not going to win that game.

Right.

And if Ejectix is going to go search the net and find who's cheapest on that, we're not going to win that game.

I want to sell proprietary food service products.

I want to sell things that we do and that we do well.

And then I may win the Agenta game because they're going to come my way.

Right.

But yeah, I mean, yeah, scary things.

To be scared about.

But also, I think, opportunity.

And it just.

For us, it means differentiation.

Differentiation.

Differentiation.

Like, how are we going to win and make ourselves as.

And play up what you do in store, too.

Right.

Or the products that you uniquely have in store.

Like, you want to win at your next girl's wine night.

Bring Wheat Thins.

But also this cheese from.

I want a charcuterie plate that's going to go with it.

Yeah.

And that's going to be.

That's the differentiator.

And sure, I'm going to need crackers.

Yeah.

But.

And we sell some really nice crackers, by the way.

Who doesn't love Wheat Thins?

Who doesn't love Wheat Thins?

Yeah.

Moral of the story.

Can we get sponsorship from them?

Is that.

I don't know, we might work on it.

At least cut you a deal on what your rate for Wheat Thins.

I appreciate that.

Yeah.

Well, that's sort of a crack.

Yes.

This has been so great.

Neil, thank you for spending so much time with us.

We know you have a lot going on, so thanks on behalf of Chris.

Chris and myself and on behalf of our audience as well.

Thank you to all of you who've been following along and to the Fusion Group for helping us bring all of our grocery shop coverage to you all day today.

And until our next interview, be careful out there.