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Grocery Consulting

Our grocery consulting practice helps our retail clients win in a competitive environment by enabling them address their biggest business challenges.

Contact our Grocery Consulting Team

 

Grocery Industry Challenges

We work with our grocery clients to transform their businesses to deliver measurable results and help future-proof their business.

Pressures to Adopt eCommerce Capabilities

eCommerce is on the rise in the industry, forcing grocery retailers to make significant investments in eCommerce technology not previously required to operate the business.

channels

Diverse Delivery and Fulfillment Channels

Delivery costs are a major hurdle to profitability with the rise in eCommerce grocery. Grocers are challenged with bringing last-mile delivery costs down while protecting product availability, product quality, and customer service.

shifting competitive landscape

Shifting Competitive Landscape

The competitive landscape for grocers has changed immensely with the growth of discounters in the space, as well as more food brands selling direct to consumer and the increase in food delivery from restaurants.

Changing Consumer Behaviors

Changing Consumer Behaviors

Staying ahead of changing consumer shopping behaviors, such as shifts towards buying online from traditional eCommerce giants and an increase in ready-made meal purchases, are challenging for grocers.

consumer tastes

Evolving Consumer Tastes

Consumer tastes keep evolving and grocers must create a modern retail organization to meet changing preferences like the increasing desire for fresh, organic, and sustainable foods.

GROCERY INDUSTRY TRENDS

The coronavirus pandemic has changed the way consumers shop globally. But, it’s not the only change that grocers are facing right now.

Micro-fulfillment Warehouses

Grocers are rolling out micro-fulfillment warehouses to better meet eCommerce demand without depleting store inventory. These facilities combine the efficiency of picking at a warehouse with speed of delivery due to proximity to the customer.

Digital Technology

Grocers are making investments in digital technology, both for pure eCommerce as well as native apps that provide more than just shopping functionality. Recipe ideas, coupon clipping, and shopping lists are all table stakes now to provide customers the best seamless, full-service experience.

Advanced Analytics in Grocery

Advanced Analytics is making waves in grocery especially in pricing and forecasting. Having the right product on shelves at the right time is key, but knowing the correct price and when to activate promotions are both areas in which analytics can impact grocery retailers. Analytics will continue to grow with regards to personalization, as retailers target consumers with offers that are timely and relevant for them.

Experiential Marketing

The in-store shopping experience has evolved to combine technology (self-checkout, electronic shelf labels, digital displays) and experiences (cooking demonstrations, wine tastings) to create a more interactive experience for customers and draw people into stores.

Private Label Differentiation

Private label brands are continuing to grow and provide differentiation for grocers who seek to capitalize on evolving consumer tastes, especially around gourmet and specialty selections.

Grocery Industry Trends

Grocery Industry Trends

Read our annual trends report to stay up-to-date with where the grocery industry is headed.

Download the 2025 Trends Report

CASE STUDY

Grocery Retailer

 

Data Governance & Vendor Portal Implementation

A $3+ billion grocery retailer with more than 300 member-owned and corporate grocery stores selected Clarkston as their partner to lay the foundations for the technologies, organizational structure, and processes to support good, quality data across their business, enabling strategic capabilities aligned to their business needs. Clarkston centralized and cleansed their data from siloed sources and capturing business efficiencies by streamlining processes through unified systems. Clarkston also helped the client develop data governance standards, build the deployment plan to integrate various legacy systems still in operation, and more.

Enabled more than 300 external vendors to directly submit new products to be sold by the co-op through the vendor portal

Rationalized 250,000 products to be converted with clean data into the new ERP system, including cost and pricing information for 150,000 items from primary distributors

Consolidated and harmonized hundreds of thousands of products from disparate store databases to allow for a single source of truth and better data visibility for the retailer

Download the Case Study

Related Insights

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Contact our Grocery Consulting team

Contact our Grocery Consulting team

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