Grocery trends 2025: Transforming the store

How grocers and mass merchants can embrace in-store technology to lower costs, improve margins, and enhance the experience

In today’s digital age, there’s no such thing as “just a store.” Modern retail spaces are evolving—from simple places to shop, to destinations for product discovery, personalized experiences, and value-added services.

Technology plays a crucial role in bridging this gap, offering solutions that enhance both operational efficiency and customer engagement. However, investments must be carefully evaluated, as achieving both objectives often involves trade-offs between the two, as well as practical considerations related to budget, integration, and usability.

In our latest POV, Transforming the store, we explore how grocers and mass merchants can embrace in-store technology to address grocery industry trends while also delivering exceptional experiences that meet customer expectations for convenience, personalization, and seamless interactions.

Digital transformation for grocery: Exploring grocery market trends through the lens of technology

In this POV, we’ll explore how grocers and mass merchants can:

• Improve gross profit margin through innovative solutions, such as AI-powered demand planning and smart inventory management, dynamic pricing, electronic shelf labels (ESLs) and connected point of sale (POS) systems.
• Leverage grocery technology trends, such as digital traceability, blockchain, and IoT-enabled sensors, to strengthen compliance with food safety regulations.
• Address rising labor costs through digital augmentation, such as inventory automation, robotics and gen AI-enabled support apps for associates.
• Manage technology sprawl through next-gen in-store supply chain capabilities and an automated order fulfillment system.
• Eliminate friction within the customer experience through innovative checkout solutions, interactive kiosks, wayfinding apps and tools, and QR codes.
• Enhance the in-store experience based on modern grocery trends through value-added services like digital shopping assistants and retail media networks (RMNs) and other digital customer touchpoints.
• Reduce shrink and waste through AI-enabled monitoring systems, advanced algorithmic software solutions, RFID technology and computer vision.