Loblaw's Lauren Steinberg On Multi-Agent AI, In-Store Screens & The Search Revolution in Grocery

Hello, everyone.

Welcome to Omnitalk Retail.

This is Anne Mazinga and I'm Chris Walton.

And we are here live from the Fusion group booth, number 1663 at Grocery Shop 2025.

And we have a wonderful guest for you today.

We have the privilege of talking to the EVP and chief digital officer at Loblaw, Lauren Steinberg.

Lauren, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's great to finally meet you.

I'm excited about this.

Yes.

So tell, but tell us about yourself, your background.

We always like first guests to tell us about themselves.

You know, how they got into retail, what they've done in retail.

And also about Loblaw too, for maybe those in the US that maybe aren't as familiar with them up north.

Yeah, well, first of all, retail is in my blood.

Is it how far back?

We're taught over 100 years, really.

My great grandmother started what once at one point was one of the largest grocers in Canada.

What?

Yeah, we.

It was called Steinberg's.

It was based in.

In Quebec, which is where I'm from, Montreal, for those that know.

And yeah, my grandfather and his brothers built it into like a, you know, a billion dollar, Multi.

Billion dollar grocery business.

Eventually it was dissolved in like the 90s and Loblaw, where I now work, took on about 33.3% of it.

And actually Loblaw still owns the IP for Steinberg's today, which is super cool.

I recently found that out.

So groceries in my blood, literally.

But no, I've been.

I love retail.

I think I've always been adjacent or directly in it.

I started my career really building websites, designing and building websites.

I parlayed that into managing websites, driving demand to those websites.

So really e commerce marketing and then eventually just went all in.

Started, you know, building and growing e commerce businesses.

Over the last 12 years, I've been doing that, or 13 years I've been doing that.

At Loblaw, where we do online grocery is the largest share of our business, about two and a half billion.

We run online beauty, apparel, pharmacy, prescription, you name it.

We're building the digital platforms for Canada's largest loyalty program, PC Optimum.

So I'm like a little of everything.

I do nothing really, really great.

I do a little of everything well, enough to really be one of the biggest and the best in Canada.

Enough to be dangerous?

Yes, enough to be dangerous.

And how many provinces across Canada is Loblaws?

Loblaw is everywhere.

We're the largest national grocer.

Okay.

We've got, we've got 2400 retail locations.

And that's if you know, Canada.

I mean, that's a lot.

Yes, we're about 10 minutes from 90% of Canadians is what we say.

And yeah, we're kind of serving every need.

We've got 17 different grocery banners, so Loblaw Zeris Fortino Superstore no frills, which is our hard discount banner.

So people know us in different ways.

Okay.

But the unifier would be PC Optimum, our loyalty program and our PC control brand products that show up in every one of our stores.

Okay.

Well, I imagine because groceries in your blood, that's how you manage to oversee everything that's under your portfolio, that you have so much passion for it and family history.

But how would you say that you break up your time in, you know, in 2025, like, where are your key areas of focus?

So like we said, I manage kind of.

I look at it as a Venn diagram.

Yeah, I love a good Venn diagram.

If you had a whiteboard here, I'd be, I'd be doodling it.

Digital, which is encompassing E commerce, retail media and loyalty.

And if you look at the three, a lot of the times in organizations like ours, they bundle things together because of a leader or a time and a place.

This is very strategic in nature.

E commerce needs retail media to be profitable.

Our retail media business needs loyalty for the data around targeting and precision, targeting and measurement.

And then loyalty really needs digital more and more because actually digitally engaged loyalty member spends 2x stays 3x longer and they're just far more sticky in your ecosystem.

And so the three of those combined allows me to kind of spend my time in any which one, but also drive meaningful value for the other.

I would say I spend the least amount of my time these days on E commerce because I've got some incredible leaders now kind of, you know, scaling.

We've scaled significantly.

You know, we've got some pretty solid infrastructure.

And so I probably spend the most amount of my time on retail media just because I haven't replaced the person who left two years ago when I inherited it.

And you know, I think it's also so new to me.

I've always, you know, I've always done E commerce.

I've always built digital platforms.

I've always, you know, been participating in loyalty.

We built that loyalty platform when I was just running digital.

So very involved there.

Retail media is like such an emerging new space.

I know in some cases people think it's mature.

It's not.

I Think it's rapidly changing and yeah, I'm like not a salesperson.

I've never done that kind of stuff so I'm kind of a fish out of water there.

But I love it and I love taking what I can do with the rest of my portfolio like using loyalty for that stuff, building you know, great digital like ad products with our digital team for you know, retail media.

Right.

Super cool.

Well so let's, let's talk about retail media then.

Okay.

What do you see as the value prop?

Because you said it's early and we agree with that 100%.

What is the value proposition of retail media at Loblaw and how do you see it evolving and how do you plan to differentiate it in the long term?

I mean it's not dissimilar from you know, the value prop elsewhere of we're really just trying to connect brands with customers in new and interesting ways while not disrupting the core retail experience, rather enhancing it.

Right, right.

And I think, I mean we're built like the growth of these CPGs is growth for us.

Right.

And so that is really important to us.

I think our focus right now is building high performing ad products across our ecosystem and unlocking measurement, just giving marketers and CPG certainty.

I'm, I told you, I think I mentioned like I did, you know, online marketing very early on.

So I've always been lower funnel marketing.

I've always been or maybe even to all funnel but really focused on performance.

Every dollar matters and I appreciate that.

That's the pain that a lot of these CPGs go through.

And so for us it really is just using kind of the force of our store network and our like we have 40, 40, almost 45% online grocery market share in Canada where I think the rest of our business about 30, 35.

So we over index and so we have, you know, if you're growing in E commerce with us, you're growing your total share.

That's where you want to be, be growing.

Right.

And so I think that you know, that's really our focus is just better performing ad products and getting closer to points of decision.

Well, with 2,400 stores though, there's still this need to connect the E commerce and what you're doing in store for your consumers.

Using your Venn diagram, how do you, how do you think about kind of the next several years here of really that, that integration and how does retail media play into that?

How does personalization for your loyalty consumers play into that?

Like what are some of those strategic guideposts for you for integrating in store and digital.

I mean, I think customers are finding ways to do it on their own.

Interesting, right?

I think for us it's really like just about making that easier for them.

Like, I saw a customer taking a photo of one of our aisles and asking ChatGPT, where is this thing?

Yeah.

That they couldn't find.

Like, that's the level of technology that we're, you know, I don't want to say competing against, but that we're dealing with that customers are getting used to.

And so it's like, how do you bring that intelligence into your experiences and then augment that with coupons and product boosting and, you know, more, more like better, you know, richer product details and you know, so on and so forth.

So I think for us, like a, I want to bring, you know, better utility in our digital apps into our stores.

No question about it.

I think that's a great way to funnel demand into your E commerce proposition.

And once you do that, you've got, you know, a stickier customer.

And then two, I think it's, you know, we've got to continue to invest in our digital experience.

Like I was talking on stage earlier about search, like searches for me, keeps me up at night, wakes me up in the morning, excited.

I mean, you know, almost over 45% of add to carts on online grocery happen through our search.

So it's meaningful.

You make a small improvement there.

That's big, you know, big, big, big change for us.

And I think, you know, answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity, they're changing expectations.

So you need more semantic, more conversational.

And they're also, you know, more commerce is going to happen in those spaces.

So how are you showing up there?

How are you differentiating between yourself and those guys?

Like I was saying earlier, like, you know, you'll Google your symptoms but you're still gonna go to a doctor.

Yeah.

And so like each thing has value, each thing has, you know, purpose.

How do we make sure that we've got, we're hanging on to our value proposition really tightly and, you know, let those guys do what they're good at.

So Laura, I'm curious too.

Like, I don't want to read between the lines too much, but like, how do you, how do you think about some of the, the, I don't want to call them new because they're not really new, but some of the in store media channels that are developing more quickly in some retailers than others.

So like digital screens, in store audio, how do you play?

Do you.

How do you think about those?

Like, do you think you love them?

Yeah, we don't have enough of them.

We're going to do half of them.

So I think.

Okay.

In Europe, and maybe I don't know about the state so much, but in Europe they started in store and they've slowly kind of broadened their spectrum to DSPs and you know, 3P.

Like marketing, we did the opposite.

I think the first step that we made in retail media was we acquired a DSP now called mediaisle, you know, similar to the trade desk, where we kind of run a lot of our business.

Of course we did, you know, rmp, so like sponsored search on our sites and whatnot.

And now we're starting to get into stores.

That is where 90% of our transactions are happening.

That is where you're making that final decision.

Maybe not every decision, but that final decision.

And so I think pairing it with obviously upper funnel or, you know, 1P and 3P off outside of store marketing is helpful.

We've got about a thousand screens in our stores today.

They're largely on the peripheral.

So you see them on your way in, but you don't see them again until you're on your way out.

Okay.

And we're going to be changing that.

We're going to be launching.

We're probably going to more than 10x that number.

And the difference is it's not more on the periphery.

We're going to have end caps, we're going to have in aisle and that's going to, you know, have a lot of.

There's gonna have, there's gonna be a lot of intelligence within those.

I think that's what marketers want.

They just want more options.

And the reality is like, what I've learned from retail media, which is not dissimilar from kind of the early experience of building e commerce products for everyone.

Yes, to serve everyone is hard.

Like we're a grocer.

You serve everyone.

And so it's like, who's your core customer?

It's like everyone is our core customer.

How do you prioritize?

How do you build for that?

Right.

It's not different for retail media.

It's really, really hard because I don't want to say any like CPG names.

We're like, but what this guy wants is different from what this person wants.

And what, you know, what, what, how they, how one measures success is different from how another does.

And so I think you do need to diversify, but not in a way that over Complicates or you're chasing too many things.

You have to find what the, you know, what you.

You have to have a lot of conviction.

What do you think will really work?

We've seen early indicators that In Store performs for us when paired with.

With other types of advertisements, both our own and others.

And so it's like, cool, like, let's find the right partner.

Let's do that really well.

We don't have to build everything, which we do a lot.

We, you know, we're.

Look, we.

We found a partner to help us scale In Store media.

We've got radio In Store audio.

One of the cool things that we did early on was sync screens and audio together, which I love.

Like, little things like that, you know.

So, yeah, I think there's like.

And you don't really need to, like, buy these, you know, I don't know.

I'm looking at a bunch of vendors.

I don't want to say you don't need to buy software for it.

We're lucky that we, you know, we've built a lot of infrastructure, that we have a lot of extensibility.

But I think, you know, no experiment is wasted.

I think that's kind of our mentality.

Okay, cool.

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

So we're at Grocery Shop.

It's a tech conference.

You just alluded to some tech.

Yeah.

What technology really gets you excited about as you think to the future, as you try to think about your job, all your many hats.

In the Venn diagram, which ones are you most excited about?

I mean, obviously I'm going to say AI.

Any.

Any particular type?

I mean, I think agentic, which we've kind of been doing for some time.

I think conversational for search.

Like I said, search is so important to us, but I think AI for personalization, there's a little bit of everything.

So for example, our personalization efforts, we kind of combine all of our behavioral and transactional customer data, and we use an LLM to prompt that raw data and develop a really rich customer profile that outlines dietary preferences, lifestyle preferences, demographic information.

And we use that to run through several different.

So that's the LLM part of AI.

And then we run that through a bunch of agents, what we call merch agents, to say, okay, well, if this is what this person is like, here's the type of product they would like.

And then you tie that type of product to actual SKUs, and then you connect that SKU to actual, like, products in our stores.

And then you layer in your preferences.

So if you're a vegetarian then we're not going to show you that meat version.

Like it's all those things, AI powers all of that.

It's different types of AI, it's LLMs, it's agentic, it's you know, content creation on the fly.

So like image generation that's automatically created on the go.

So I mean I like just our personalization efforts uses like four or five different types of AI.

And I mean I think there's a little bit of hype in there.

Obviously like agentic AI we were, that's just, you know, different like AI talking to each other and hand off, handoff, hand off.

We've been doing that for some time.

We now call it agentic.

Acting on its own as a, acting on its own or connecting the dots between a bunch of different, you know, algorithms and, and whatnot.

But I mean I think, yeah, that kind of stuff is so interesting to me.

We're lucky because we have a really composable built in house technology infrastructure.

So like I was talking about on stage earlier, like OpenAI announces they're doing, you know, commerce with Shopify.

The reality is if you actually read into it and you go to their website and you look at all the documentation, anyone can launch commerce on those platforms.

They launch with Etsy, they've given, you know, everyone access to acp.

If you've got the right infrastructure, if you've got the right APIs and product feeds, you can just go, you can go and build your use cases and start doing that too, which is what we're doing.

And I think it is having that flexibility.

Yeah, for sure.

I think, yeah, we got, you know, we've got a few use cases of like turning recipes into carts, you know, buying our apparel and beauty right then and there, you know.

So I think there's like a lot that we can test.

You know, we like to place a lot of bets.

We never go, we never do massive bets.

Like we, we didn't build a massive CFC before we launched online grocery.

We, you know, we, we very quickly, as soon as we could got out of monoliths, you know, to run our business as much as we can have extensibility and flexibility in our systems so that we can experiment.

I remember when like, I remember when the metaverse came out and we were all like, metaverse is the future.

It's like, yeah, we touch our toe in that but not too deep.

We didn't jump in.

And that's why, you know, we weren't kind of left in.

No one's buying groceries in the metaverse yet, as far as I know.

And so, yeah, I think that's like, super important.

Interesting.

That's awesome.

Wow, Great.

Well, Lauren, thank you so much for spending the time with us today, for sharing with our audience.

I mean, you are so much further ahead in with that strategy, I think, than a lot of the people that we've been hearing from at this show.

So it's really a testament to how people should be thinking about their strategies for especially AI based search.

Oh, yeah, you don't need much too, by the way.

We have a team of like 10 people in AI.

More than half of them are co ops, so it can be done with very little.

You just got to enable.

So.

Well, there you have it.

You heard it here first, is right.

You don't need to ask for resources.

Lauren's gonna have her own show pretty soon.

She's got it down.

I've got enough.

Big, big thank you again to Lauren, to the Fusion group, for helping us bring you all of our coverage here from grocery shop.

Stay tuned for more.

And until our next interview, be careful out there.