Grocery industry is going through monumental transformation, Today’s customer is looking for utmost convenience, and personal & memorable shopping experiences. Nothing short of exceptional shopping experience is sufficient, in-store or online.

Labor market is constrained like never before. Hiring and retaining staff at the grocery stores is one of the most challenging aspects of running the business. This means grocers need to do more with the resources they have.

This also means tasks that were traditionally manual such as inventory management, procurement, forecasting, scheduling, etc. will need to be automated otherwise in short-staffed conditions tasks pile up or are executed with a high error rate, and almost always result in a bad experience for consumers (e.g., empty shelves, long checkout lines, misplaced items, etc.). Hence automation and the technology first approach towards execution is the key to ensuring highly accurate and efficient operations.

Inflation and rising costs: Cost of goods, freight and operations is increasing at an unprecedented rate, and there’s no coming back. This is the new normal. In addition, grocery is traditionally a low margin business. High costs, and low gross profitability means there’s very little margin for error.

Hence, in order to continue to grow the business and drive profitably, grocers will need to reinvent the foundation of their business. The new foundation needs to be data. Grocers need to drive all the decisions based on the data and not only rely on historical analytics but also leverage the power of machine learning and AI to accurately predict the needs of tomorrow.

Reinventing the business on the foundation of the data, the data that you as a grocer own, is the only way to win in the digital future of groceries.

New digital era of retail marketing: Retail marketing is also going through a monumental shift. Gone are the days of mailing paper flyers, even standard digital flyers have low value. Shoppers’ appetite for deals and discounts hasn’t dried up but the way shoppers want to be targeted has changed drastically. Shopping journeys are increasingly starting on search engines and leading social media platforms as that’s where today’s consumer hags out. The grocers that master these platforms will gain a location advantage in the new world, and their acquisition funnels will perform highly. When it comes to retention marketing, the fastest way to lose a customer is targeting them promotional offers that are irrelevant to them. Hence the everything from ads and promotion targeting needs to be highly personalized. This is the biggest challenge for grocers across the globe in terms of reinventing themselves as a digital marketer.