REWE Digital's Anika Vooes on Lighthouse Projects & Making Tomorrow's Money Through Innovation

Hello and welcome back.

This is Amitak Retail coming to you live from the Fusion Group booth here at NRF Europe 2025.

I'm Anne Mazinga.

And I'm Chris Walton.

And standing between us, we have a revisiting guest.

Returning guest is the right word that I'm looking for.

Not revisiting returning guest.

She's revisiting too.

Yes, that sounds good.

That's okay.

Annika.

Voose.

Did I say Voose?

I'm going to work on that.

I'll have it by the end of this interview, I promise.

Just say Annika, that's fine.

And I will react.

Annika.

She's like Cher.

Yes.

Annika is the chief acceleration manager for Reva Digital.

And Chris, we met Annika back in the day when we were touring the Reva stores throughout Europe.

We did, yeah.

Long time, long time.

Omnitok followers will probably know Annika, but yeah, why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, your career and also about Reva too.

Too.

And what your role is.

Yeah, yeah, I will.

Thanks for the nice introduction.

Really happy you're having me again and that we're meeting in Paris.

That's really great.

Of course.

So river, for those of you who don't know, is really one of the biggest retail groups in Germany.

We have brands like the river supermarket, the Penny discount stores, and yeah, we are employing hundreds of thousands of people in Europe, live in over thousand locations and river really is driving digital retail and innovation.

And river started nearly 100 years ago as a cooperative with independent grocers and grew into one of the biggest players in Europe.

Yeah, 15,000 stores is a lot of stores.

15,000, that's big, right?

That's large.

Yeah, that's pretty big.

And what about yourself?

Tell us about you.

Yeah, myself.

Well, I'm really, really enthusiastic about building bridges between startups and corporate world.

So that's what I'm able to do.

I drive venture management for River Group, especially focusing on startup partnerships.

Okay.

So what I do is bringing in cutting edge startup solution to real business problems and together making them drive real impact for retail and beyond.

Well, in addition to being that bridge, Anika, between startups and corporations, Reva Digital, in this case, what would you say is one of the most important functions of your role as chief acceleration manager?

So it is a lot about change management, about driving innovation, being edgy and crazy.

Right.

On one hand.

But on the other hand being able to.

Yeah.

To link that with a corporate world.

So.

So you really need to be able to understand both sides if you want to work with them.

So that is kind of the building bridges that I do most.

Yeah.

With my team.

What is your, what's your team look like?

What is, what do you oversee as acceleration manager?

So I have a small fantastic team of people sharing the enthusiasm for cross innovation.

So they, they have all different kinds of backgrounds, a lot of startup.

Startup background.

Okay.

But you know what the other side is facing and challenging, right?

Yes.

We have corporate experience.

We are all really creative because there's so many challenges you need to overcome.

So you need to be positive, mind, creative and yeah, really enthusiastic in order to do that.

Right.

You need the right culture and team of people in order to do that.

Definitely, definitely.

So if we rewind the clock, when we first had you on our show, you were.

The reason was because you were one of the first companies to go full on into piloting and rolling out autonomous stores and so remind our audience what that was all about and then give us an update on where things stand now.

Yeah, I love thinking back.

Really?

Yeah.

Right.

Because I mean this was probably the most, the coolest, the most challenging and most exciting project that I did in my career so far.

No doubt, no doubt.

I don't doubt that.

I mean we were so successful with that project.

Going live after idea in such a short time and the customers loved it, the press loved it.

I met so many great people like you who wanted to exchange about the technology, the experiences we made.

So.

So yeah, that was really an extraordinary project.

And yeah, where are we now?

It still really is a lighthouse project for River.

Yes.

And we put so much energy in the development and not stopping, but really looking at customer experience and making it better.

So it was, we had like a radical change as the whole idea of that project.

Thinking we need to think customer journey really new.

And a while ago we were radical again because we realized that checking in at the entrance isn't kind of the natural behavior for our customers.

They're just like, okay, download the app, stand there.

So what we did is we changed that again to the exit.

Okay.

So the journey that people were really used to like in other avus stores.

And that is so cool because now, I mean when you were there, you downloaded the app, you waited until you got the receipt and now at the end of the store you go to a till and you just press that you want to pay and all your items are listed and you just check out.

And that really is so magical and it really boosted adoption, which is a.

Very Common way to check out over here too, in Europe.

Right.

Like, that's not an uncommon way to come out of a store.

Right.

So it's just.

That's what they have habitualized all their life.

I go through the store and I pay at the end.

Right.

So that really was a game changer.

You used a key word there that I want to double click into.

You said lighthouse project.

Yes.

What do you mean when you say lighthouse project?

So if you really want to make the organization understand what you're doing in innovation, like when I started, we were like the crazy people doing things that are maybe not relevant for our daily business.

Innovation is something in the future, Right.

Or do we have money for that?

Yeah, right.

Yeah, but with these projects, you really hit the core.

So it's like a lighthouse shining on everything, making people understand because they can see it, they can feel it, they understand the relevance, and it really works.

It's not just some crazy lab experiment that will never live through real life.

Right now it is there.

It's out in.

In six stores in Germany and one store.

Six stores now.

Wow.

Yes.

Outside Germany.

And yes.

And it really works.

So that is lighthouse effect.

I mean, that people really understand what we did there.

I like that.

I've never heard that term before.

Have you heard that term before?

No, I haven't.

But I'm curious, Annika, you said something there that I want to get your expertise on because Chris and I also worked on what might be called a lighthouse style project back when we were at Target.

But how are you justifying the.

The investment in continued innovation and acceleration at Reva Digital?

Because I think that's something that we really need to stop and appreciate Reva for because you they are continuing to make that investment.

How has your role kind of helped justify continuing to push in innovation?

Yeah, well, you need both.

You need people earning today's money, and I work with the people who earn tomorrow's money.

It's a good way to put it.

So.

So not investing is the problem.

Of course you can ask, is it really worth the money?

Well, we will see.

This is innovation and some innovations fail.

That's my everyday life.

Not every idea gets to scale.

But if you don't invest, you will fall behind.

I mean, we all know the innovators dilemma, right?

If you're successful and think nothing can happen to me, that's the moment when something will happen to you because you will miss out on the radical change that will come.

Right.

Well, and I, I'm curious too, because you pivoted you went from, we're going to do this one way, this is how we're going to deploy it to now.

We're going to change things around.

We're going to do, you know, we're going to have them scan a code at checkout.

What, what goes into making those decisions and making those decisions successfully.

When you're working on innovation projects, I.

Think it's a constant test, fail, learn, and then adapt.

Okay.

And I think the adaption is the hardest part for many people working in innovation because many innovations stop at fail.

Right.

Okay.

Did that didn't work out next?

No, but you have to first, you have to need to have that gut feeling, thinking, no, it's not done yet, let's try something else.

And that is a game changer.

I think if you're able to learn quickly and you don't want to learn over years and years and years.

Right.

You need to kill your darlings as well.

When you don't think you can reach the top, leave it.

Yes.

But for the things where you think you have that gut feeling and that's what people in innovation have, they're all gut feeling.

Right.

When you have the feeling there's something in it, then adapt and try something else.

Right?

Yeah.

It's a product management discipline.

A product management philosophy really too.

Right.

Like adapting as you go, continuing to iterate.

Yeah.

Yes.

I love what you said.

I love what you said about there's people that make today's money and we're about making tomorrow's money, too.

That brings it home for me.

100%.

Well done.

That's great.

Well, Annika, we have to ask, because you are an expert, what, what is it that you're looking at at NRF here at the show?

What technology is piquing your interest now as you think about how you're making tomorrow's money?

I will focus on startups, on investors.

So looking at the early stage.

I.

Want to see where's the most attention on AI use cases, what's going on, where are the new ideas and seamless omnichannel solutions?

Who's really putting value on digital twin ideas?

Okay.

So, I mean, there's so many things.

Data strategy is something as well.

So I'll be on the lookout for the trending things and for the things coming up in the future.

Okay.

Annika, how many projects do you have going at any given time in the experimentation arena?

That's really hard to answer.

I think it's a portfolio that you need.

You can have not more than Two big projects at the same time.

Because when we do very innovative things, they take some time.

So you have one person on it for a year or maybe longer.

They need to become experts of the field, know the technology, and also bridge the way from lab to everyday business.

Because we don't stop after lab.

We want it to really go to scale.

So you need to balance that with some speedboat projects and some things in between.

You don't want to run out of things at any point.

So what we're doing, we have these big innovation projects with innovation managers, but we also have startup partnerships with more mature solutions that are plug and play for a pilot, really?

So that you can balance your innovation portfolio.

Got it.

That's very different than the approach we heard earlier today.

It's amazing how.

And we've talked to other people, both on camera and off, and they all manage this idea differently.

Some people have, like, hundreds of projects going on where you're like, I want two really important projects.

And so it's interesting to hear everyone talk about it differently.

All right, so I'm curious, maybe there's another lighthouse project on the horizon in 2026, but what are you most excited about coming up in this next year?

I'm really excited about further pushing the boundaries of corporate innovation.

Okay, so what does that look like?

Can we accelerate things?

And I really believe in cross innovation, especially with startups.

So that will be my focus.

The way we work with startups, the number of startups we can work with, and really being a good partner for startups, because that's a hard thing to do for corporates.

Right.

And I think that will really push the speed that corporates are able to gain in that crazy new speed of innovation that we are facing.

Right.

That's a big task you have ahead of yourself.

I'm up for it.

I can think of no better person to take on the job.

Yeah, no, you got.

You're a real expert here.

We got a real expert with us here.

Well, thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

It was a pleasure.

There's a lot of nuggets from this conversation that I'm already thinking about and talk.

Think about spinning up and talking about on social media.

So it's really wonderful.

Thanks for spending time with us.

Enjoy the rest of the conference, too.

I know you just came in on the train, so.

Yes.

And thanks to the Fusion group for allowing us to come and do all these fabulous interviews with all these great executives from across the pond.

And until next time, be careful out there.