Originally published on LinkedIn 

For many years, I was obsessed with grocery stores, writing a series of articles on marketing from the grocery aisles. I’ve always felt grocery stores were the great equalizer, appealing to people from all walks-of-life and ages from bubblegum-popping teens shopping for chips and soda pop to senior citizens choosing colorful produce and whole grains to boost their health.

The ability to shop for food has never been more vital than in the age of COVID-19. Even before the pandemic, grocery stores and hypermarkets were central to the vitality of communities, supplying jobs, providing food, pharmaceuticals, household items, and business and postal services, and supporting local events and food pantries.

The traditional grocery stores of the 1900’s, which exclusively offered fresh and dried goods have morphed, supporting the unique needs of neighborhoods, including cooking classes, prepared, fresh, frozen, and packaged foods, mini in-store shops stocked with kitchen and cookware, books and magazines, cosmetics, clothing, cut flowers and potted plants, and much more.

In the last few decades, grocery stores have leveraged technology to better identify and meet customer needs, improve their operational efficiencies, optimize staffing, and reduce costs. Inside the store, shoppers value cleanliness and order, fully stocked shelves and cases, intuitive signage, and end caps that highlight new and featured products.

Behind the scenes automated fulfillment, logistics and warehouse systems help ensure a consistent supply of goods from thousands of vendors. Sensors can track in real-time goods on shelves. There’s no need for a clerk to walk through the store, surveying each aisle. From a connected device they can see what’s been purchased and when, and what needs to be restocked. Smart shelf sensors can also be used to update pricing in real-time.

Data, captured by sensors, can then be relayed to supply chain systems, which automatically trigger or reroute deliveries.

A growing trend, which will probably dramatically increase in the future is micro-fulfillment centers (MFC). These compact, urban warehouses, often squeezed into dense inner cities, can autonomously fulfill online orders, reducing the cost of the “last-mile,” by decreasing the distance to customers, and providing same-day delivery and curbside pickup.

Using robotics, a MFC developed by Takeoff Technologies can pick 800 items per hour versus 60 items for manual in-store picking, and can process approximately 3,500 online grocery orders weekly, with orders ready for pick-up within two hours.

Since the start of COVID-19, Amazon and subsidiary Whole Foods Market have expanded their online grocery order capacity by 60% to meet the growing demand. Nevertheless, they’ve had to limit the number of online grocery customers because of the challenge of delivering within specified timeframes. The same is true for curbside pickup. You can’t have dozens of customers milling around a parking lot, waiting for their orders to be brought out, especially if the parking lot holds only a handful of cars.

COVID-19 has shone the light on how grocery stores are vital to people’s everyday lives. The simplicity of running into a store to pick up a few things for dinner has been replaced by the purposeful chore of ensuring you’re six feet or two carts away from other shoppers, limiting the purchase of certain items, such as toilet paper, and being told not to shuffle through goods you don’t intend to purchase, such as scavenging for a carton of milk with the longest expiration date. Then, upon returning home, wiping down boxes and containers with sanitizer, thoroughly washing vegetables before putting them away, and refraining from placing reusable shopping bags on the counter.

With people being asked to stay-at-home, the humdrum of grocery shopping has turned into a trending topic. It’s also elevated the crucial work done by clerks, cashiers, and cleaners who make it possible to wheel carts down aisles, choose what we need, and efficiently check-out. It’s exposed the people behind the scenes, drivers, warehouse workers, and store and operation managers.

Additionally, it’s revealed how anomalies – the hording of rice, beans, canned goods, and sanitizers – can ricochet across an entire supply chain, leaving shelves bare for weeks. And it’s illuminated the challenges faced by farmers, ranchers, food processors, and wholesalers when demand dwindles with the closure of restaurants, bars, schools and universities, company cafeterias, hospitality businesses, and other eating establishments.

The United Fresh Produce Association estimates these closures have resulted in $5 billion in losses to produce growers, shippers, and wholesalers with $1 billion in lost sales every week the pandemic continues.

Like many catastrophic events – and COVID-19 certainly qualifies as catastrophic for a myriad of businesses, organizations, and individuals – slivers of hope and opportunity become apparent. Introduced several years ago, scan-and-go mobile checkout was never widely adopted. However, it can provide a safer shopping experience both for consumers and grocery workers. Fred Meyer, a hypermarket chain located throughout the pacific Northwest offers Scan, Bag, Go at 26 of its stores. The solution lets shoppers select, scan, bag, and electronically pay for items, using an app on their smartphone or a handheld scanner, supplied by the store.

The vitality of grocery stores has never been more urgent. Technologies has the potential to transform the shopping experience, making it safer, simplifying the purchase of foods, and providing stores with the cost-efficiencies to continue playing a central role in communities of all sizes.

Photo by Martijn Baudoin on Unsplash