How Lowes Foods Builds Tech Around Shopper Experiences
Lowes Foods has always been about the shopper experience, from flower-making events at the in-store communal table to birthday parties at the Cakery to food and beverage concepts that serve as brands within a brand. That same priority applies to tech deployments, according to two company leaders who spoke at Progressive Grocer’s GroceryTech event.
“We like to think about things a little bit differently. At the end of the day, it’s all about driving experience for our guests – really delivering that from a merchandising standpoint and partnering across the organization, and obviously from a digital standpoint, on how we can continue to bring that to life,” explained Glenn Figenholtz, SVP of merchandising at the North Carolina-based grocery chain, a division of Alex Lee.
Figenholtz and his colleague, Chad Petersen, SVP, digital, delved into ways that shoppers are the proverbial hub and tech tools are the spokes. “We try to bring digital to life in a way that best supplements and amplifies what we do,” Petersen said.
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To his point, Lowes is integrating digital features across its business at varying scales. “We’ve been doing e-commerce at Lowes Foods since 1997, and most people don’t know that we were probably one of the first grocers in the world to do that. Back then, it was more of a concierge-type program, with early internet, and things have changed significantly since then,” Petersen shared, adding that this history helped the grocer during the COVID era.
“We were positioned in a way that we could lean in and re-architect the way we operated off a strong base. Covid helped us reimagine fairly quickly what we wanted to do and what we wanted to be. We leaned into our personal shoppers and activated things like texting and voice-to-text with our partners to have that relationship with our guests,” he continued.
According to Petersen, the architecture bridged in-store and digital experiences. “The ‘happy path’, as I call it, is where a household is activating in-store and online. Our personal shoppers can pick your order, stage it and then a guest may actually park their car and come in, grab a beer in our Beer Deen and maybe get a few more groceries on their way out. We’ve hit all of those marks in that particular journey and are driving loyalty.”
Pickup has proven popular, but Lowes has also worked with a close network of providers to enhance delivery service. “Again, technologically, we're able to kind of flex to the different providers,” Petersen reported.
Lowes extends its branding and thoughtfulness across other tech activations. “We’re making sure that we are leading technology decisions with strategy. Especially being a regional grocer, we don't necessarily have R&D and innovation labs, so we have to make very careful decisions,” Petersen pointed. “If you think about the digital framework and building a discipline and governance, we can't take our guests and punt them to different endpoints, different apps, different web experiences.”
In addition to the all-important notion of seamlessness, using tech to convey value has proven pivotal over the past few years. “We bring it to life throughout ‘brown bag’ offers that are delivering the right price. We also have our little ‘Easter eggs’ that we tie in. If you pick up one of our private label products, for example, the UPC code on the back is actually shaped like a barn, which ties back to the outside of the store that you see,” Figenholtz said.
Lowes also utilizes tech tools to optimize its loyalty program. “We have elements for charitable give-back to schools, digital coupons and those kinds of things. But we are also thinking how we keep moving that value proposition forward so it aligns with what we are doing in our stores. For example, right now, you can’t necessarily buy a ticket online to one of our events at the store. But if you want to come and do cake decorating, how do we unlock that capability? We can leverage the opportunity enroll a guest and start to personalize programming and events,” Petersen said, citing other examples, like offering coffee rewards to frequent users of the in-store Boxcar Coffee bar or giving fuel discounts or point for guests who find that relevant.
Added Figenholtz: “It's all about delivering the right relevant offer and all the way down to a store level of, “Do we have the right product in the right store?’ All of this is going to require better master data management as we think about natural language AI and ask questions from insights and analytics. That underpinning of making sure our data framework across the board in the right way will be key to really get the true personalization unlock.”
