Jewel-Osco, Groupon and Unilever Bring Social Buying to Chicago

Supervalu, Inc.’s Jewel-Osco division is teaming up with Unilever and Groupon, Inc. to bring social buying to grocery shopping in Groupon’s home city of Chicago while at the same time making Unilever the first global CPG company to allow consumers to buy its products through Groupon and pick up their deal at their neighborhood grocery store.

“Jewel-Osco has been serving the Chicago area for over a century,” said Kat Kozitza, Supervalu’s director of interactive and direct mail marketing. “As one of the leading retail grocery chains in Chicago, Jewel-Osco offers an extremely convenient way for shoppers to pick up their Groupon deals, which will offer great savings and value to our loyal shoppers.”

Through Unilever’s “Summer of Ice Cream” program, shoppers can buy $15 worth of their favorite Ben & Jerry’s, Popsicle, Good Humor, Breyers, and Klondike products for only $9 on Groupon.com – a 40 percent discount – and then select and pick up their items at any Jewel-Osco location. Jewel is the first banner in the Supervalu family of stores to offer in-store redemption with Groupon, as well as the first Chicago-area grocery retailer to participate in the program, which became available on www.groupon.com/chicago today .

“We think this is a fabulous deal and a great way to let our consumers bring home a selection of their favorite ice cream in the heat of the summer, as well as to introduce new consumers to our products,” said Marc Shaw, director of shopper marketing for Unilever North America.

Here’s how the Unilever offer works: A shopper purchases the deal on Groupon.com and enters their Jewel-Osco Preferred Customer Card number. If the shopper doesn’t have a Preferred Customer Card, they’re immediately invited to sign up online. Once the Groupon purchase is complete, the deal value is digitally loaded onto the shopper’s loyalty card. When the shopper purchases their ice cream at a Jewel-Osco store and scans their Preferred Customer Card at the check-out, the deal is automatically credited on their bill.

“Unilever and Supervalu [are bringing an] ideal summertime option to shoppers in the Chicago market,” said Darren Schwartz, SVP of sales at Groupon. “We look forward to continuing to work with Incentive Targeting to introduce the Groupon model to new partners across the grocery industry and pass on these unbeatable deals to our subscribers.”

Incentive Targeting, located in Cambridge, Mass., helps retailers and brands how to better understand and influence shopper behavior. It provides a self-service Web-based application to create, manage, and measure behaviorally-targeted promotions across a growing network of retailers. Using analytics and software, brands and chains can collaborate around shopper insights, and marketing managers can target shoppers and create promotions in minutes instead of weeks or months. Incentive worked with Groupon to bring social buying to Big Y in June (Click here to read the Progressive Grocer story on Big Y and Groupon).

“We are continuing to work with Groupon to bring social buying to the grocery retail market, now with our second chain,” said Win Burke, president and CEO of Incentive Targeting. “Using the combined Groupon and Incentive Targeting system, CPGs like Unilever and grocery companies like Supervalu can deliver great offers to their shoppers, measure the effectiveness in real time, and follow up with highly desirable shoppers with attractive targeted programs.”

Groupon, launched in November 2008 in Chicago, features a daily deal on the best stuff to do, eat, see and buy in 43 countries around the world. Groupon uses collective buying power to offer huge discounts and provide a win-win for business and consumers, delivering more than 1,000 daily deals globally.

Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Supervalu operates a network of approximately 4,294 stores composed of 1,114 traditional retail stores, including 805 in-store pharmacies; 1,280 hard-discount stores, of which 899 are operated by licensee owners; and 1,900 independent stores serviced primarily by the company’s traditional food distribution business.