Top Things You Missed

This week in grocery, Kroger, Natural Grocers and Giant Eagle all step up personalization efforts.

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Marks & Spencer is deploying the CommerceHub Commerce Suite, in an effort to be able to quickly expand assortment, boost customer engagement and loyalty, and attract new customers. The retailer also intends to gain agility and flexibility in performing its merchandising and fulfillment processes.

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Amazon is combining human expertise with artificial intelligence (AI) to prevent the sale of counterfeit items on its platform.

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The Baltimore Orioles Major League Baseball team is partnering with integrated payment technology provider Shift4 to provide a frictionless shopping experience at concession locations across its Oriole Park at Camden Yards home stadium. The Orioles will leverage the Shift4 end-to-end commerce ecosystem, including frictionless mobile ordering and payment technologies.

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Unilever is investing in robotics, AI and quantum computing, seeing them as key to the next stage of beauty innovation. It is currently testing three collaborative robots, or cobots, in its Liverpool lab.

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Papa Johns fans will be able to purchase digital copies of three of the company’s popular international pizzas, which will soon be able to translate into real-life rewards.

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CEVA Logistics and Geek+ are teaming up to supply consumers with footwear and apparel through the use of autonomous mobile robots (AMR) at the former’s Grobbendonk warehouse, located in Belgium’s Antwerp province.

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Today, Siam Makro, the leading wholesale center in Thailand, announced the expansion of their partnership with RELEX Solutions, provider of unified supply chain and retail planning solutions.

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Phillips 66 expanded its partnership with retail technology company Upside and plans to offer personalized cashback promotions to attract new customers at more Phillips 66 sites in 2023.

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Apple is officially rolling out its Apple Pay Later “buy now pay later” solution to select U.S. Apple device users. Initially announced in June 2022 and then postponed from a fall 2022 release, Apple Pay Later allows users to split purchases into four payments, spread over six weeks with no interest and no fees.

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Generative AI-produced pictures of imaginary Nike collaboration sneakers have circled social media for weeks. But that’s just one example of how AI can be used in fashion; its uses are already valuable and vast, spanning marketing, engineering and immersive experiences.

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Southeastern Grocers Inc. has unveiled the world’s first autonomous micro-factory at its Jacksonville distribution center, in Florida. The company is piloting ice manufacturing with partner Relocalize to help eliminate middle-mile logistics and reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions, water waste and plastic pollution.

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Accenture, Microsoft and Unilever have reportedly completed one of the largest and most complex cloud migrations in the consumer goods industry. The migration has helped Unilever become a cloud-only enterprise, helping to ensure secure and optimized operations.

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Retailers need to ensure shoppers always have access to the product they want, where they want it, or else they risk losing loyalty in a difficult environment. Perry Ellis is managing this challenge through the rollout of RFID technology, in partnership with Mojix, that will help the retailer manage its supply chain from the store level all the way through broader inventory planning.

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To reduce the time to 20 minutes from one hour, the merchant had to make operational changes at the stores to make its employees more efficient. Office Depot upgraded its hardware to Zebra mobile devices that run its inventory system software to alert employees in real time when they have to pick a time to fulfill a BOPIS order.

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Officeworks will partner with RELEX Solutions. The RELEX solution will service Officeworks 166 stores and 7 distribution centers throughout Australia, driving improvements to planning across its supply chain.

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Fujitsu has announced a five-year deal worth £57.9 million with UK hospitality giant Whitbread.

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Amazon sellers are turning to the AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT to automate some of the tasks associated with running their online businesses. The tool has been used by sellers to write listings, come up with catchy titles, and brainstorm new products.

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PetSmart and Instacart are expanding their partnership into Canada, allowing shoppers to have greater access to the pet retailer’s private brands. PetSmart is the first dedicated pet retailer available on the Instacart App in Canada, with more than 150 stores in the country now available to order from on the app.

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ABACUS, a leading Spanish cooperative retailer and distributor of cultural and educational products and services, will partner with RELEX Solutions, provider of unified supply chain and retail planning solutions, to provide forecasting, replenishment, allocation, and promotion forecasting.

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The company used to spend 3 hours per day on its cash management. Ivan Youseff formerly owned four McDonald’s franchise restaurants in Minnesota. Cash management was one of his biggest headaches.

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The leading specialty health-and-wellness retailer is rolling out HughesOn managed network services from Hughes Network Systems, an EchoStar company, across its more than 700 U.S. store locations. The hosted, cloud-based Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) solution provides The Vitamin Shoppe with a secure software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN).

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Amperity today announced a partnership whereby Amperity will become Authentic’s cornerstone partner for data management strategy, helping to unify in-store and digital experiences for consumers across its portfolio of brands.

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Having previously supported optical retailer Specsavers in Northern Europe, Valtech has announced an expansion of the partnership globally.

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At its investor meeting, the company said that by the end of fiscal year 2026, it aims to have 65% of its stores be serviced by automation, approximately 55% of the fulfillment center volume to move through automated facilities, and as a result, predicts unit cost averages could improve by roughly 20%.

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Mntn, which builds advertising software, is assisting Francesca’s in placing content and measuring its effectiveness. Mntn uses current customer profiles to determine potential customers to market to.

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Fishpools, a specialist in home furnishings and accessories, has selected Fresh Relevance technology to power personalised experiences for its customers across its website and email marketing.

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Earl Enterprises – which represents notable full-service dining brands such as Buca di Beppo, Brio Italian Grille and Guy Fieri’s Chicken Guy – selected PAR’s Data Central, allowing its existing restaurants to seamlessly integrate with existing point-of-sale programs, accounting, payroll systems and more. It will also implement the technology to all future locations of its brands moving forward.

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The company is currently implementing a composable architecture while overhauling its end-to-end customer experience. From strategic counsel to the implementation of processes and technology, Valtech will help The Very Group via its Valtech_Inside model.

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As the brand’s senior director of guest and employee experience, Ronald Benjamin is tapping into technology to ease operations while providing better customer service.

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Walmart said on Tuesday it expects around 65% of its stores to be serviced by automation by the fiscal year 2026. In a press release, the U.S. retail giant said around 55% of packages that it processes through its fulfillment centers will be moved to automated facilities and unit cost average could improve by around 20%.

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Dollar General’s media network, DGMN, has teamed up with Meta on a first-to-market solution allowing advertisers to reach hard-to-reach consumers and close the loop with in-store sales. Under the partnership, advertisers can access Dollar General’s more than 90 million unique customer profiles across the Meta ecosystem via such placements as Facebook and Instagram News Feeds, Stories and Reels.

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The AI platform addresses abandoned shopping carts by analysing sites to: identify actions to improve the customer experience, accessibility and performance; rank insights based on predicted value and effort; and ensure teams focus on the right areas.

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Grab2Go has opened a pharmacy self-service solution in Estonia. Customers can select the product they need, use their preferred method of payment, and the machine will dispense it immediately.

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Ahold Delhaize owned retailer Albert has announced, in partnership with Brain Corp and Tennant Co., that its fleet of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) deployed across its Czech Republic hypermarkets and two distribution centres have officially cleaned over 20 million square metres (215 million square feet), completing over 92,000 cleaning routes.

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A leading luxury goods resale company is optimizing and streamlining the entire experience of purchasing and selling goods on its omnichannel platform. The Real Real Inc. is partnering with Salesforce to launch several new features aimed at both sellers and buyers of used luxury goods.

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Walmart Inc. has been pouring investment into its e-commerce operation for years in an effort to catch up with Amazon.com Inc. Now it’s trying to boost its appeal with a new online look.

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Finnish pharmacy chain Yliopiston Apteekki has announced an expansion of its partnership with RELEX Solutions, provider of supply chain and retail planning tech, and workforce management solution specialist tamigo.

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Albertsons Cos. has entered new partnerships to help expand consumers’ access to nutritious food and medications. The Boise, Idaho-based food and drug retailer on Friday said it’s working with financial services technology provider FIS—which represents supplemental health benefits administrators like Fresh Connect, Pay Forward and WEX—to use its payment platform and with benefits card provider Soda Health, which tailors health benefits to individual needs.

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Deploying artificial intelligence and machine learning in ways that improve both the customer and employee experience across such a massive environment is the focus of Walmart’s AI strategy, said Anshu Bhardwaj, senior vice president of tech strategy and commercialization at the retail giant.

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Smashburger has opened a virtual drive-thru at a corporate-owned restaurant in Houston. An extension of the traditional drive-thru experience, the virtual drive-thru allows customers to place an order online or through the Smashburger app, then pull through the designated parking lane, where their food will be delivered by a Smashburger team member.

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