Top Things You Missed IN Retail

Macy’s Inc. is turning to technology and best practices to help achieve a circular supply chain. The department store retailer, which in March 2022 said it will direct $5 billion of its spend, scaling through 2025, to the partners, products, people, and programs that help create “a more equitable and sustainable future via its new “Mission Every One” social purpose platform, is launching initiatives to reduce, reuse and recycle.

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Nike has joined Ant Group’s Green Energy Initiative and launched an official mini programme on Alipay to encourage more consumers to recycle worn out shoes.

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The Kroger Co. is moving beyond the pilot stage with a self-checkout solution that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision technology. America's largest grocery retailer has been steadily expanding use of self-service checkouts at locations across the country, and is now implementing a solution it developed using Everseen’s Visual AI. This technology leverages high-resolution cameras and a combination of computer vision and AI capabilities developed on Nvidia’s Accelerated Computing AI Platform.

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Walmart Connect is expanding its capabilities, forming partnerships with various social channels and tech companies to allow advertisers to better utilize social media, entertainment, t-commerce, and live streaming via new ad formats. Brands such as Procter & Gamble (P&G), Johnson & Johnson (J&J), and Samsung have signed on.

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Bill Miller Bar-B-Q, a popular Texas-based fast-casual restaurant specializing in Bar-B-Q cuisine, today announced its partnership with DailyPay, the leading provider of on-demand pay. Through the partnership, Bill Miller Bar-B-Q employees will have access to their pay after completing a shift.

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McDonald’s Corp. will bring multiple departments together in a facility called “Speedee Labs” at its global headquarters in Chicago. Speedee Labs will be focused on driving the customer experience and supporting innovation.

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Azazie follows a carefully crafted customer engagement approach that extends across all touchpoints.

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Mindtree, a global technology services and digital transformation company, today announced that it has enabled the UK's leading retailer of technology products and services, Currys, to deliver a connected and highly personalised omnichannel shopping experience to its customers across multiple markets.

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In an effort to reel in more online seafood sales, the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI) is teaming up with ad platform Chicory. Through this partnership, ASMI and Chicory will provide consumers with ideas on how to choose, order and prepare meals made with wild Alaska seafood.

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Beginning next month, shoppers will have access to more than 375 Sprouts stores using the DoorDash marketplace to get the grocer’s products delivered to their doorstep, according to the release.

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The digital shift is undeniable in many parts of Latin America that are among the most connected economies on the planet, but the cultures of this continent are famed for a vibrant human spirit, and brands operating there must find the ideal balance of humans and digital. A high-profile example of this is the quintessentially American brand Levi Strauss & Co., 150 years in the making. It is now emerging as a LatAm favorite, using new strategies and styles in a part of the world where physical retail is still the heart of how shoppers like to engage.

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Aldi, which recently overtook Morrisons to become the UK’s fourth largest supermarket, has announced a partnership with delivery operations experience management firm parcelLab.

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For more than a century, Rogers & Hollands has delivered unparalleled customer service to customers during their most special life moments. The family-owned and operated business has grown from one store to the largest multi-channel jewelry retailer in the US. To continue to provide its customers with the high-touch shopping experience the brand is known for, Rogers & Hollands recently implemented Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service (POS).

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Sam’s Club is building a design studio on its Bentonville, Ark. campus. The studio will mark the warehouse club retailer’s first dedicated space for innovating, creating, and collaborating among different departments. In a corporate blog post, Martin Granstrom, VP, head of product design & research, Sam’s Club, said the retailer decided to create the studio in response to the development of technology-driven offerings such as endless aisle, omnichannel commerce, and “phygital” retailing.

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An Indian agricultural supply chain technology platform backed by Walmart is launching a new solution for agri-export-import businesses in the Gulf region. Ninjacart, which received a $145 million investment from Walmart and its Indian e-commerce subsidiary Flipkart in December 2021, is rolling out the “Ninja Global” platform. The solution is designed to enable agri-export-import businesses operating in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and its fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait to build networks, gain access to new markets, and expand globally.

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Another Broken Egg Cafe has successfully deployed Revel Enterprise at all company-owned full service restaurants. Moving forward all new cafes will implement Revel along with existing franchisees' migration by 2023.

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Content experience platform firm, Contentstack, has announced the addition of ASICS to its customer base.

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Badger Technologies has announced a production rollout of its Badger Technologies multipurpose autonomous robots with Busy Beaver Building Centers, Inc., operator of 25 full-line home improvement centers in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. Following a successful pilot launched earlier this year, Badger Technologies is deploying production robots starting at a new store in Delmont, Penn., where associates seamlessly manage more than 33,000 Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) while embracing the latest in retail automation to improve operations and shopping experiences.

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EG America is working with DoorDash to offer delivery of snacks, sandwiches, pizza, coffee and more. Customers can order items from EG convenience brands including Cumberland Farms, Certified Oil, Fastrac, Kwik Shop, Loaf N' Jug, Minit Mart, Quik Stop, Sprint, Turkey Hill and Tom Thumb through DoorDash's app and website.

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Vince, a banner of Vince Holding Corp., and Burton Snowboards are now offering the "Tap to Pay" feature on iPhone mobile payment feature on its NewStore associate app. Tap to Pay on iPhone is available to U.S. retailers that use Adyen as their payment service provider.

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On-demand delivery of bargain-priced merchandise will be available to consumers under a new partnership between Big Lots and DoorDash. With the new agreement, consumers can choose from 36,000 Big Lots items on the DoorDash app and website — an assortment ranging from home goods to cleaning supplies — and have them delivered from one of the home discount retailer’s 1,400 stores.

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Most recently, Capriotti’s announced partnerships with Wavemaker Labs (the incubator that launched Miso Robotics) to open franchised stores with the intention of testing AI and automation technologies, and Piestro to bring automated pizzamakers (and pizza on the menu for the first time) to select locations. These investments are just the latest developments in a digital-forward strategy the Las Vegas-based sandwich chain has developed since the pandemic.

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Choice Hotels International, Inc. is building on its longstanding commitment to increasing owner profitability with a free resource for its hotel owners: Your Key to Profit. Launching in the fourth quarter of 2022, the new platform will centralize all Choice's proprietary profitability tools in an on-demand, mobile-friendly system to better enable success for owners' hotels.

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Dagrofa, one of Denmark’s leading food companies with over 500 grocery stores, will partner with RELEX Solutions, provider of unified supply chain and retail planning solutions, to provide automated and optimized forecasting and replenishment planning for their distribution centers.

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TGI Fridays has partnered with DataDelivers to implement a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to provide clarity on the brand’s customers and improve customer marketing efforts across channels.

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Ingka Group says that it has reduced food waste by 54% in its Ikea stores. That translates into more than 20 million saved meals and 36,000 tonnes of CO2e that have been avoided. This results from more than 20,000 Ikea food co-workers who were trained to use Winnow’s AI technology in their daily routines.

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Outback Steakhouse parent Bloomin’ Brands Inc. will expand all its concepts to the Grubhub marketplace after having select Carrabba’s Italian Grill locations on the platform. Bloomin’ will add Outback, Bonefish Grill, Flemings’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar and the virtual Tender Shack to Grubhub pickup and delivery, the companies said.

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Robots cooking chicken wings might sound like a storyline from a sci-fi movie, but it’s actually the latest concept from Wavemaker Labs, the corporate innovation and product development incubator responsible for launching robotics brands like Piestro, Miso Robotics, Bobacino, and others.

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Sam’s Club has revealed a partnership and first-to-market application programming interface (API) integration of its Members Access Platform (MAP) with Pacvue, an enterprise software suite that enables brands, sellers and agencies to manage their e-commerce business. The partnership will give Sam’s Club MAP advertisers access to search and sponsored product ads via Pacvue, allowing brands to better reach and engage with Sam’s Club members at the key moment of discovery and purchase.

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SCI Group, a leading Canadian 3PL specializing in e-commerce fulfillment and Transportation Management, has partnered with Bench, an athleisure clothing brand, to create a cross-border ecommerce fulfilment solution for the U.S. market leveraging duty savings made available through Section 321. This direct-to-consumer strategy enables Bench to deliver to e-commerce customers in the U.S. directly from Canada, creating cost efficiencies without any impact to delivery times.

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Upshop and Itasca Retail announced their merger today, integrating Itasca Retail’s merchandise receiving, retail ordering, and inventory optimization and management — most notably the Magic™ Inventory Intelligence and Computer-Generated Ordering application — into Upshop’s total store operations experience.

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Aiming to innovate new ways for suppliers and sellers to connect with customers, Walmart Connect has announced an Innovation Partner program that will help advertisers access channels such as social feeds, entertainment, t-commerce and live streaming during the holiday season. The Innovation Partners in this program are TikTok, Snap, Firework, TalkShopLive and Roku, Walmart said Tuesday.

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In order to revamp NAYA’s training process and turn it into a core strength for the brand, Street went searching for training technology that would resonate with the team members she was hiring. She chose Opus, a mobile-first training platform built for businesses, like NAYA, that have a large deskless workforce. The platform has helped NAYA’s training program retention rate rise to 98.1 percent, meaning the brand is overwhelmingly getting employees onboarded in an efficient manner, setting them up for success from day one on the job.

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DoorDash announced a new partnership with sports equipment and apparel retailer Dick’s Sporting Goods to give retail consumers access to same-day delivery. According to DoorDash’s press release, it's the company’s first sporting goods and apparel retail delivery partner. Consumers can now order items from Dick’s directly on the DoorDash app, expanding access for DoorDash members and non-members looking to shop at the sporting goods retailer.

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On a night when Russell Wilson returned to Seattle and received mostly boos from Seahawks faithful, fans were cheering for a new high-tech concession stand at the team’s stadium. Lumen Field became the third professional sports venue in Seattle to feature Amazon’s cashierless “Just Walk Out” technology in a food and beverage store. The new District Market, located across from the Fan Deck at the south end of the stadium, also utilizes Amazon One, the company’s palm-scanning technology, making Lumen Field the first and only venue in the NFL to feature both innovations.

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The company, which began as an online delivery platform but has been taking steps in the past year suggesting it wants to join major technology providers such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook, has evolved into an omnichannel tech platform. Instacart now offers Connected Stores — a bundle of new and existing Instacart Platform technologies intended to help grocers build a unified, seamless, personalized experience both online and in-store.

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Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas has unveiled four new turkey frictionless stores. The home stadium of the Las Vegas Raiders NFL football team is operating the stores, which measure an average of 240-sq.-ft., are installed directly into empty concourse spaces in as little as one week. They provide a frictionless shopping experience with the Zippin checkout-free platform. Leveraging the Zippin solution, the stores enable shoppers to tap a credit card to enter and then select the items they want.

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Lidl has been working with RELEX’s solution for forecasting and replenishment in several countries to boost transparency and flexibility throughout their supply chain. This partnership allows Lidl to meet their goals of higher availability, lower inventory levels, and reduced out-of-stocks.

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Lowe’s is tapping NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise to create interactive store digital twins in Mill Creek, Wash,. and Charlotte, N.C.

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Lowe’s is partnering with Nvidia to create digital twins of its stores. Lowe's Cos. has unveiled an interactive virtual model, or “digital twin,” of two of its stores. The home improvement giant is leveraging technology from Nvidia to create photorealistic digital replicas of the stores to enable store employees to visualize and interact with nearly all of a store's digital data. Built by Lowes Innovation Labs team and leveraging Nvidia’s Omniverse metaverse environment, Lowe’s digital twin is currently live in two stores (in Mill Creek, Wash,. and Charlotte, N.C.).

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Marks & Spencer has partnered with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to upgrade its in-store space, range and display (SRD) capabilities.

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The new app is now available on both the Apple App Store and Google Play, and was created through partnering with Punchh, a PAR Technology Company.

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Wyndham Hotels & Resorts today unveiled a new, portfolio-wide, mobile tipping solution for its U.S. and Canadian franchisees, making it one of the first major hotel companies to do so. Developed and managed by Béné, a leader in cashless tipping, the platform enables guests to easily tip hotel team members digitally via their preferred mobile device and is now available for adoption by Wyndham franchisees across all brands. It comes as a growing number of consumers adopt and show preference for digital payments, which according to consulting firm McKinsey, 82% of Americans are now using.

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Zippin has launched Zippin Lane, a new turnkey solution that, the company claims, enables retailers and concessionaires to deploy checkout-free stores in under a week.

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