Retailers were talking about the same topics—in a different way—at Groceryshop

Retail Brew swapped the Big Apple for Sin City last week, heading to Las Vegas for Groceryshop to hear industry leaders weigh in on the industry’s most pressing topics.

As it turns out, the biggest topics on grocery’s mind are the same ones—AI and the concept of “value”—as last year. But they weren’t necessarily retreading old ground: As retailers have executed more consumer-facing applications for AI, discussions became more results-driven than theoretical, while many grocers shared a more nuanced approach to the idea of value than in years past.

Early learnings from AI applications

If speakers were somewhat begrudgingly talking about AI last year, this year they were armed with more tangible learnings to share and were fully on board to cover the topic.

In the show’s first main stage session, Instacart CEO Chris Rogers claimed “grocery is going to be the category out of every retail category that’s most transformed by AI.” Earlier this month, the company launched Clementine, its AI grocery assistant, with features like allowing shoppers to turn handwritten shopping lists into a full shopping cart, or suggesting a grocery list based on dietary preferences or budgetary restrictions. Rogers emphasized the importance of grocers building these assistants.

“I think the industry will probably end up working with [Anthropic, Gemini, and OpenAI], but I also think that it’s up to us and everybody here to make sure that the absolute best agentic experiences are on our own channels,” he said. “And to do that, we need to make sure that we’re obtaining our valuable data and we’re putting that data to work.”

DoorDash Co-Founder Andy Fang also took the stage to discuss the delivery platform’s new AI shopping assistant, Ask DoorDash, which the company rolled out in June. Since the assistant’s launch, the company has seen 50% higher basket sizes for shoppers who use Ask DoorDash compared to those who don’t, while also checking out five times faster, he said. They’re also buying 60% more unique SKUs compared to non-AI shoppers, as the bot offers suggestions for meal planning and related products like plates or utensils a consumer might forget to add to cart themselves, he added.

Kroger, too, recently launched the latest version of its AI shopping assistant in July, which Chief Digital Officer Yael Cosset noted has helped narrow the gap between consumers’ inspiration and basket building with Kroger.

Mike Glaser, VP of commerce media at PepsiCo, said the CPG giant has found 1 in 3 US grocery shoppers are turning to AI in their shopping, but consumers’ growing use of LLMs doesn’t mean PepsiCo is particularly bullish about the opportunities for retail media in that space. Glaser said the company will “probably be in this test phase until this format starts to grow and get governed by some of the other retail media network principles.”

“It’s too soon to say it’s going to dramatically change anything,” he said.

A wide-ranging approach to value

Seemingly anyone who talked about the concept of “value” at the show was quick to mention that the term’s definition goes beyond price, an evolution of last year’s conversations that included Lidl and Whole Foods’s efforts to keep prices low.

Price, of course, is still a core component. Rogers noted Instacart is pushing its grocery partners to invest in price, sharing that retailers on Instacart without marked up prices are growing 10 percentage points faster than their counterparts—and they’re retaining those customers.

“The cost of losing sales and share over time to some of the largest digital players might be greater than the cost of removing markups today,” he said.

But price is now “table stakes,” Hy-Vee CEO Jeremy Gosch noted, and service (which he defined as “whatever the customer needs, whenever they want it, wherever they want it”) and quality need to be held to the same level of importance. Speakers from Sam’s Club, Chobani, and Target highlighted convenience, newness, and curation as core measures of value, too.

The convenience factor has been seen at Dollar General, which has grown and established repeat business for its private label brand Clover Valley by offering the products on third-party delivery platforms like DoorDash, Lydia Thacher, VP of digital commerce at Dollar General, said.

As the concept of value has become more multifaceted, Thacher said she believes retailers and brands must stop considering “value-conscious” consumers as a specific demographic.

“We’re all looking for value, whether that’s in price or whether that’s in convenience, time, and making your life a little bit easier,” she said. “Every week can look different for every type of consumer.”