Shopping For Groceries Is Easier Than Ever With Digital And Brand Innovations

Grocery shopping is like laundry. No matter how much you do it, you’ll likely have to do it again in a few days. Luckily, whether consumers are meal planning, cooking every night or spontaneously deciding what dinner will be, there is a grocery-buying solution to meet their needs. More and more grocery shopping options are becoming available online, in-app and from brick-and-mortar stores like Target, eager to hold onto a diversifying market share increasingly moving to digital options.

Target Launches Good & Gather Food And Beverage Brand

Target recently announced the launch of their new private label Good & Gather food and beverage brand. The brand will be available in stores beginning September 15th and will eventually offer more than 2,000 items. Target is well-known for their private label brands like kid’s apparel line Cat & Jack and electronics brand Heyday, but Good & Gather is the big box store’s biggest push into food and beverage. Private label brands are becoming more successful in grocery, bringing in $153 billion in 2018, up 12.5% year over year (YOY).

Target has high hopes for Good & Gather, expecting it to be a multibillion-dollar flagship brand. Unlike Walmart, Target has struggled to become a destination for grocery shopping. Despite the fact that 75% of Target shoppers usually add a grocery item to their cart while shopping, experts say groceries remain more of an afterthought for Target shoppers. The brand is hoping Good & Gather will change Target’s grocery landscape, becoming a focus of the store’s recent renovations with well-lit, end-of-aisle displays, and replacing Archer Farms grocery products with tastier, healthier Good & Gather options. Good & Gather will also be available online, where shoppers can take advantage of Target’s newly expanded same-day, curbside pick-up, Drive Up.

Walmart Expands Its Strategic Partnership With Buzzfeed

Walmart recently introduced a new innovation with brand partner, Tasty, continuing their successful proliferation of the grocery store universe. Shoppable Recipes allow viewers of Tasty videos (viewers number in the billions) to add the entire ingredient list from the Tasty video they’re watching directly to their Walmart Online Grocery Lists. Users will then schedule Walmart pick-up or delivery and dinner is planned and shopped for in one click, directly from the Tasty app.

“From watching a mesmerizing Tasty video to cooking it in your own kitchen, the missing link is buying the ingredients,” said Ben Kaufman, BuzzFeed CMO. “More than two-thirds of our audience have made a Tasty recipe and 90% of Americans live within ten miles of a Walmart store, so we’re excited to build upon our partnership with Walmart and provide a new feature that will solve the pain point of grocery shopping and make it even easier for our audience to cook their favorite Tasty recipes.” (Tasty is a food division of Buzzfeed.)

Walmart is the largest grocer in the U.S., with a 23% share of the market. And its revamping of ecommerce to include more efficient pick-up and delivery has been a boon for the brand, with a 40% uptick in ecommerce sales. “We’re pleased with how customers are responding to the way we’re leveraging stores and e-commerce to make shopping faster and more convenient,” said Walmart CEO, Doug McMillon. “We’re continuing to aggressively roll out grocery pickup and delivery in the U.S.”

Amazon, Traditional Grocery Stores And Direct Delivery Options Add To The Complex Grocery Shopping Outlook  

Amazon continues to toggle attention between Amazon Fresh and Prime Now, both grocery delivery services — with some confusion from customers about which is better and why. As the New York Times said about Amazon’s grocery woes: “Bananas are not the same as books.” The complexities of delivering fresh groceries, particularly for a savvy digital audience, may have been underestimated by Amazon. However, the outlook for grocery shopping continues to evolve and iterate to meet the needs of native tech users and consumers more food knowledgeable than ever before.

Other industry disruptors, particularly in the digital space like Instacart, create additionally hurdles for retailers trying to scale grocery revenues and consumers. (Instacart works with more than 190 retail partners, including Costco and Wegmans, and offers same-day delivery all from the comfort of an app). Traditional grocery stores continue to change and grow as well, seeing online and digital as a component of what they offer instead of competition. According to the Chamber of Commerce, “Online isn’t replacing grocery stores. Instead, it’s augmenting them akin to how the addition of in-store pharmacies and bakeries brought features to supermarkets that didn’t exist before.”

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