The future of food & grocery: reshaping on-the-move experiences

Personalized content promotes traffic, higher engagement, and conversions through tailored and relevant marketing experiences:
Generative AI will increasingly be used to create relevant, consistent, and personalized content across a range of modalities. Retailers will improvise and explore the creation of product descriptions, images, videos, etc., faster and more consistently. Generative AI models draw from multimodal data (e.g., text, image, geospatial data) to create contextually relevant content. This can be used to catalog and adapt content and segment user flow based on language, region, and customer behavior trends. Successful retailers will continue to invest in personalization and omnichannel capabilities to attract, engage, retain, and deliver value to customers.

Tapping into new revenue streams and business models like retail media:
At its core, retail media is neither about advertising nor media; it’s about understanding the customer’s journey and being able to meet their requirements and inspire and preempt their needs. This is possible because of access to first-party data collected directly by the retailer, which is highly specific and accurate. For grocers, this means precise, highly targeted, personalized campaigns and seamless integration of ads across touchpoints.

There is no stopping when it comes to conversational commerce:
Conversational commerce enables consumers to make purchase decisions and transact through technology such as messaging apps or voice prompts. This feels tailored, tactile, sophisticated, and personal and can potentially engage people and foster brand loyalty. Typical usage will include AI models that suggest a shopping list for a specific recipe, provide customer support, come up with product recommendations, make reservations, and man multiple communication channels at once.

People are on the move, and retailers are catching up:
Shoppers are spending much more time on the move, and the on-the-go service is shifting in response. Several grocery retailers are either entering or expanding categories such as ready-to-eat, ready-to-heat, and ready-to-cook. We are also seeing some grocery players come up with small spaces adjacent to stores, which offer deeper experiences – think cozy spots that cater hot food on the go, hole-in-the-wall cafeterias, and seated restaurants that offer unique experiences.

Gen Z and millennials care about ecological awareness, nutrition, sustainability, and low-waste packaging:
Climate change, sustainable innovation, and a more health-conscious youth are tilting the sector to sharpen a farm-to-fork focus. Gen Z and Gen Alpha like to read labels and make informed dietary choices more than ever. In this environment, driving real change intersects everything from sourcing, processing, distribution, and consumption whilst serving and empowering intrinsic communities. Some retailers feel skeptical about effectively performing against ESG targets, but depending on the category, emission reduction can impact costs positively. It’s just that so far, organizations have not put in place the right accounting practices to track emissions accurately. We see this change in the near term.