Heritage Grocers CEO Reveals Exciting Customer-First Initiatives During GroceryTech
During day one of Progressive Grocer’s GroceryTech event in Dallas, Heritage Grocers Group CEO Suzy Monford took to the stage to share how her team is leading the charge in customer-first innovation through the power of AI.
Based in Ontario, Calif., HGG is the largest Hispanic and ethnic food retailer in the United States. The company operates in six states – California, Texas, Nevada, Arizona, Kansas and Illinois – with approximately 60 stores under the Cardenas Markets banner, almost 30 stores under the El Rancho Supermercado banner, more than 20 stores under the Tony’s Fresh Market banner and seven stores under the Los Altos Ranch Market banner.
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To help create seamless shopping experiences, Heritage Grocers is working with Instacart on a few initiatives. “We are migrating our app into Instacart Storefront Pro,” said Monford. “It's white labeled, so it opens up not just Marketplace online, but our app will now become an integrated loyalty and e-commerce app. It enables seamless shopping and integration of both loyalty and e-commerce. It enables shoppable recipes. It also enables retail media. It's all AI.”
Heritage Grocers is also working with Instacart on its Caper Carts.
“Prior to taking the role at Heritage, I was an advisor to Caper," explained Monford, "so I've spent a lot of time studying and I'm really, really excited about this Caper Cart. ... it's the frictionless, autonomous cart. With Caper, you don't have to have a loyalty sign-in, but you can. Ours will be integrated with loyalty. We'll be the very first Hispanic grocer to roll out Caper Cart in the United States.”
Plus, its Caper Carts will be bilingual — Heritage Grocers will be the first food retailer to offer shoppers the ability to select English or Spanish as their primary language. To start, the company will test and pilot their Caper Carts at the Tony's banner, in the Chicago area, with plans to go fleet-wide.
Monford also points out that NVIDIA chips are powering every Caper Cart. There are approximately seven cameras, she said, to process customer data in hundreds of milliseconds.
“And what does that mean? Well, it enables us to have geo-located offers that pop up,” said Monford. For example, as a customer walks down the dairy aisle, the Caper Cart screen will notify the shopper that their favorite milk is on sale.
“Listen, these carts are not the fad. They are going to become [a] trend as not only Caper, but Amazon, rolls out their own dashboard,” added Monford.
In addition to working with Instacart, Monford revealed at GroceryTech that Heritage Grocers is partnering with tech company RELEX Solutions.
“I brought in RELEX because I knew immediately I had to hit the ground to do assortment optimization pricing and promotion optimization,” said Monford. “We did that whilst we also opened up an RFP [request for proposal] to bring in pricing and promotions, tools and solutions.
“We've done a very deep RFP dive over the last six months,” she continued. “We're going to bring RELEX on as our platform for using AI, GenAI and machine learning to help us quickly. We're talking milliseconds now to take our data, take our transactional data, run it through a model and, based on who our customer is precisely on a store-by-store basis, help us optimize pricing and promotion in real time.”
Overall, Monford always looks to leverage what's new and what's next to help her customers. “I've got to have technology that helps me put the customer at the center of everything I do, of all the decisions that I'm making, all the prioritization. So we're leveraging tech to do that, to optimize our assortment, to optimize pricing, to optimize promotions and to hyper-tailor for them.”
Through its partnerships Instacart, Caper, RELEX Solutions and more, HGG is defining what it means to be a modern Hispanic and tech-forward grocer. “We're the largest Hispanic retailer, and we represent this voice, this Hispanic customer that, frankly, our industry is eager to learn from,” noted Monford.
Progressive Grocer is hosting its annual GroceryTech event June 10-12 at the Marriott Dallas Uptown. This one-of-a-kind conference is geared toward grocery retail executives who are seeking new solutions to accelerate tech-enabled growth in every corner of their business.
