Operational Execution Still Wins in Retail with DFI Retail Group’s Scott Price | WRC 2026

All right.

Hello, everyone.

This is Omnitalk Retail.

I'm Chris Walton and we are coming to you live from the World Retail Congress in Berlin from the Vusion Podcast Studio.

And joining me again, literally again, is Scott Price, the CEO of DFI Group.

Scott, welcome back.

It's great to see you.

Good to see you as well.

Chris, what brings you back to WRC this year?

So this is third year, like the forum.

It's a great way for retailers to get together, not only to learn from one another from around the world, but importantly, you get really good support vendors who come in with the newest technology, the newest products, et cetera.

It's a great way.

I go to a lot of these things, but I think WRC is a highlight each year.

Yeah, I'm curious.

I'm curious, too.

Is your approach changing to the show as the different topics that come about change?

Like, AI is a big topic right now.

Do you take a different approach to it, like in terms of how you plan your day, the meetings, you take, all that type of thing, or is it pretty standard?

Do you know, it's funny, two years ago, I didn't even think about AI because it really wasn't a topic in terms of disruption.

This year, it's all about AI.

I think that's going to be a topic for the next couple of years.

We've got quite a few team members along with us.

Many of them are here purely to understand how AI is going to basically impact their jobs.

Right, right.

Yeah.

And I'm going to ask you about that later, too, so stay tuned.

But.

All right, so first I want to get to why we're here, why I do what I do, which is Omni.

Omni Channel, Omni Talk.

You guys have seen remarkable results at DFI.

You've seen 140 basis point increase in online sales penetration.

Your order volumes have also doubled.

What does it take on the ground to see numbers like that?

So, you know, we've talked about disruption of AI, and the reality to me is that the biggest risk to any retailer is by not executing well.

So it doesn't matter how great your app is, it doesn't matter how great your retail media is in reality, if you're not fulfilling the perfect order, delivering it to the commitment, if you're not giving the customer the ability to get the product the way they want it in the time they want it.

So we're several hundred thousand orders a day now online, a good majority of those.

Our food, coffee and our 711 and our other formats of I Get on the train.

I order my breakfast and it's sitting on the counter.

I pick it up and I go to the office and we've got a couple of hundred thousand of those orders.

But it has to be done perfectly and it has to be done consistently.

Yeah, it's kind of, think about it, it's like, it's like the basic blocking and tackling of retail hasn't changed but now the premium on doing it a certain way is amplified.

Right.

Because the consumer's expecting more and so you've got to cross those T's and dot.

Social media will kill you when you disappoint a customer.

Oh really?

Yeah.

Right, right.

So you've also, but you've also not only the omnichannel numbers, but you guys have also been gaining market share pretty significantly too.

Do you attribute that to the same.

Same factors or are there other elements at play there too?

Well, I think just, you know, customer first as a strategy means that I think we walked away a from understanding customer insights, etc.

We're very broad based.

There is no single Asia.

We're across 12 countries.

You know, how how a customer in China interacts with food or convenience is very different than how a customer interacts with health and beauty in Jakarta.

So we've gone back to the basics and actually I put really one of the biggest change in terms of our, what I call a turnaround in is we have pushed decision making back close to the customer.

We had a very centralized model, we've pushed it back.

We hold people accountable for delivering but we make a lot of that decision making done in the country.

Got it.

Interesting that the Jakarta quote may be the quote of the show there too, my friend.

That was pretty good.

All right, so the next question I have for you is, you know, part of that too is knowing what not to continue to invest in.

So you've divested some businesses over the past year.

What was the rationale there and what has that enabled you to do or freed up money to do?

So we did a full review of the portfolio and we took a look at right to win and one thing that became very apparent is if you have a minority position in a large scale retailer, you have no ability to make that a good retailer through a board seat.

And so we divested all of these minorities mainly to reinvest back in the core of the business.

But we also paid a special dividend.

The second is ensuring that we're only investing in the formats that we know.

And so we have made it very clear that, you know, we're not an apparel retailer.

We never will be an apparel retailer.

That's not where we want to invest.

We're in daily essentials.

So that's really where we've doubled down, being very clear in the markets and that we believe have the highest return on investment.

And as a result, you know, our stock price has more than doubled.

We've gone to, I think, a reasonably good return on capital.

We've committed to a 15% return on capital by 2028 to the capital markets, which is very strong for a retailer.

And it's by focusing on what we think we can win in.

Yeah, indeed.

Nicely done.

Nicely done, too.

Kudos to you for that.

All right, the next thing I want to ask you about is really the loyalty side of the business.

You've got a huge loyalty base, I think 33 million members strong or 30 plus million members strong.

What is it about doing business via that vehicle or platform in Asia that's maybe different than the US Particularly on the retail media side of things.

Or is it.

Is it similar in approach?

And I'm just over complicating it with the question.

Well, I think it's all headed in the same direction, which is first and foremost, control of the data.

Okay.

Oh, interesting.

We, with 33 million loyalty members across multiple formats know a lot about our customers, which means that we have the ability to personalize.

And there's varying levels of personalization.

One level of personalization is saying, look, I know that you haven't bought shampoo from us and I'm absolutely certain you have hair and therefore you're going to my competitor.

How do I ding you with a very attractive offer that makes sense for you to get that from me.

Right.

The second is enabling through Gen AI Solutions, which is how do I go to my customer who shops at our welcome stores in Hong Kong who comes in and says, look, I want to spend 100 Hong Kong dollars on dinner for the family of four.

Chicken needs to be the main dish.

And that not only do you give them the solution, but you help them put all of that in the basket.

The third area that really doesn't yet exist in our work area is Genai.

That data will help, but an autonomous relationship where the customer says, you know enough about me.

Do my weekly shop and get it sent to me without them intervening.

And that's truly, I think, the apex of where I believe Genai is going.

We don't see that yet, but control of that data through those loyalty programs will be a key enabler when we're ready to turn on that ability.

Got it.

You know, Scott, too, there's been a lot of hubbub in the US lately too, around this issue of dynamic pricing.

How do you think about dynamic pricing in the context of loyalty and promotions and personalization?

I think.

Well, first I've banned the words dynamic pricing.

Yeah, I would too.

Can't stand.

Because it becomes immediately associated with gouging.

Which means, you know, there's a famous example from many, many years ago where this really got started in the word dynamic pricing.

I heard for the first time 25 years ago where there was a CEO of a beverage company who said, you know what?

We're going to do these smart vending machines and when it's hot, the price is going to go up.

And there was this outrage and in the end, he lost his job to me.

What we say is, look, it's around personalizing offers.

So I will have a standard price in all of our businesses and then we will again customize those offers to motivate you to purchase.

We will never increase pricing for one profile and decrease on another.

Yeah, yeah.

It's based on your loyalty.

You get the better deal based on your loyalty and your.

And your proclivity to shop with that retailer.

No, I think that's dead right?

And yeah, so anyway, there's a whole host of rabbit holes we could go down that.

But 100% agree with you and love that you've banned the term too.

All right, last question.

I said I'd come back to it.

AI.

I am curious about how you are thinking about AI in the long term.

Where it will play into your business and where it won't play into your business as well.

Or maybe you have a framework that you can use to help put piece that together for me.

So we kind of break it into three areas.

So I touched on the customer personalization and the ability to bring to a customer a more sticky relationship because you know them well through the loyalty, the data and their shopping behavior.

The second is around team productivity.

So how do you make your team members more productive?

We have already an enterprise Gemini which allows team members, basically enterprise.

So it only uses company data, but it's attached to a single static LLM so that we've got the ability to do well.

The third area, running a better retail business, is not that mature yet.

So, you know, I think about a brilliant merchant who is outstanding in a particular category when you think about them doing a line review and they start with all the statistics in terms of my slow moving, my fast moving.

Then they insert their own brand strategy.

Then they think about visual merchandising in terms of do they ribbon or do they block?

And then they think about new product and innovation.

They had 43 options sold to them by various vendors.

Which six are they going to bring?

That process can be facilitated but I have not yet seen a tool that means you don't need that human doing that end to end process at various stages.

So we're not there yet.

I've been told it's being developed but I'm not ready to say that a merchant's job could yet be done by Gen aa.

That's really interesting.

So I like how you're splitting that.

You're basically saying there's the productivity side and then there's the productivity plus side of the ledger as well.

That brings the art of the merchant, the art of the negotiation into a new realm that you couldn't get to without it before.

That's a really smart way and really interesting way to think about it.

I'm going to borrow that from now on.

I'm going to attribute that.

Feel free.

Of course.

All right, well, Scott Price, CEO of DFI Group, thanks for joining us here today.

Thanks to the World Retail Congress and Divusion for our coverage.

And as always, be careful out there.

See you next year.